>>Welcome back to Boston. We're down in the Seaport. This is the Cube's coverage of red hat summit, 2022. I'm Dave ante with my co-host Paul Gillon, Sebastian Moes. Here he is a senior enterprise architect at bit mark Sebastian. Thanks for coming to the queue. Welcome to the United States. Good to have you in Boston. >>Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. It's uh, good to be on a live summit again after, uh, those, uh, testing two years >>Strange, isn't it? I mean, people kind of don't know what to do. Shake, bump this bump, >>And >>It's like, but where everybody wants to get out of the, the home, the lockdown and, you know, there's a real pent up demand. Tell us about bit mark. >>Um, bit mark is a managed service, uh, provider for, um, German statutory health insurance companies. Um, we manage about our software that we develop, um, is for about 85% of the, uh, German health insurance companies. Um, we have, uh, not only do we build the software, we also have data centers where we run software for, for our customers. Um, and it's everything that a health insurance company is, uh, mandatory to have to run their business, so to >>Speak what, what's the life of an enterprise architect like these days and how, how has it evolved? How has it changed? Uh, I mean, independent of the pandemic, will we get to that, but, but, you know, technology changes, organizational objectives of, of changed the public policy changes. How, how was your, the life of an enterprise architect changed? >>Um, well we, we have this, uh, big monolith JG E application that is, uh, run on JBO. Um, and now we want to, we want to change that into a more modern environment and using, uh, OpenShift to do that. Um, and yeah, there's, uh, there's a lot of reg regulatory things that come up that need to be, um, need to be figured in. Uh, there is new demands that our customers have that we need to figure out how to get to market, uh, and to be able to deliver software more faster and, you know, make the turnaround, uh, or have the turnaround be less. >>So kind of following the technology trends of going from big monolith to microservices and containerization and distributed data, the, the, >>The whole, the scalability, uh, you know, and quick turnaround, that is, that is the main focus. >>So the application that you're here talking about this pace to face in application, kind of a new market for you, a new direction, is this part of that overall shift to a more modular microservices based, uh, >>Structure? Um, well, we, we, we had applications like this before, but this is a new branch of it because, um, there's a strong drive in Germany too, for more digital digitalization. Um, and to have a new interacting model with the customer from basic things to more advanced features like medication services, vaccination status, um, managing your allergies, and that's an edit value that we want to give, uh, for our customers. So they can, their customers can benefit. >>I dunno what it's like in Germany, but in the United States used to call up the doctor and say, Hey, can I just, can we do this over the phone? No, you gotta come into the office. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and then of course, with the pandemic, it was like, you can't come into the office. It was just total flipping, cuz you could get 80% of what you needed done, and this is what your app enabled essentially. Right? >>Yeah. And, and some that and some added value as well, uh, to, to give, um, yeah, a benefit for using this, uh, online interaction for, um, the insured people, the, the patients, >>Essentially a digital gateway, including your data. Well, that's the other thing you can't get right. As a patient, you can't ever get through your data, it's like right. You >>Get it, but nobody else can >>Get it. <laugh> sometimes it's hard for you to get it cuz of again, in the United States, HIPAA and the, and the, and the requirements for privacy restrict often access to, to data, you have to go through hoops to get it. So, uh, so, so that experience is what you codified in your application. Yes. >>Um, yes, we have this, uh, unique data set of all health related information that people have to, uh, interact with in, in when they're sick or when they deal with their healthcare company. Um, and yeah, we wanna provide that data to the customers. So they're able to look at it. Um, there's also the, uh, electronic patient folder. You can say, um, where there's data like medical exams and stuff in there that they have access to. We provide that as well for, for our customers. Um, but, uh, yeah, it is about the interaction and that I can see when I put something in to my insurance company via email or the doctor put something in that I have the interaction on my phone and see when it was delivered, um, to them when it's active, when I get the money, stuff like that. >>Now this application is built on OpenShift, it's cloud native, uh, has all the constructs. How different was that for your development team from building something like you mentioned, the monolithic Jbos application that you already have, how different was building the cloud native, uh, >>Constructs. Um, it is quite different. I mean, it's building software, there's a lot of the same things involved. We've been, we've done agile and scrum, uh, before and so on, but we now have a, um, we're trying to be, or no, we're actually achieved to be faster in bringing this to market, um, deploying it in different data centers, doing it all automatically doing automatic tested, uh, right as part of the pipeline. Um, there's, there's a lot of huge steps that we can, we're able to take because of the technology. And that's why we did go there in the first place. That's why we said, okay, this is, it needs to be, uh, cloud native. >>You found that red, red hat had the full suite of tools that you needed. >>Um, yeah, I mean, we, there's some open source stuff that we've also integrated into the pipeline and everything, but there's a lot of, for example, we are using the, uh, three scale, uh, the API management from, from red hat, um, just to be able to, um, use the functionality that we build, that the customers can use the functionality in other products that they use that serve partner people, uh, uh, certain partner companies can, are able to use the services as well. >>Okay. So the, the, the dumb question is, but I'll ask it anyway is you could get this stuff for free Kubernetes, open source, you know, you get E Ks for free. Why didn't you just use the freebie? >>Why? Um, well, we're, we're on a scale with so many, um, uh, customers and data centers that we have to take that we do need support in, in a way. Um, and I usually say, so if we take software from whoever, whatever company it is, we're gonna break it. Yeah. <laugh> um, the, the, the transaction load that we have is, is quite, uh, intense and the performance that we need, uh, especially in the, in the business to business, um, market is, is so big that we do need the interaction with, with a vendor and that they're able to help us, uh, with certain escalations >>German Germans play rough. So <laugh>, um, you know, when a, when a vendor announces an innovation lab, I always go, okay, that's an EBC, like an executive briefing center. It's all gonna be used for sales. But my understanding is you actually leveraged the innovation labs. It was actually helpful in building this application. Is that true? >>I, I, I actually, uh, to part in the open innovation that we did with RA hat, and we knew we knew what we wanted to do. We, we knew the technology, we knew what we wanted to have done, um, but they helped us to, to get there step by step with the, with the tools they have, the, um, uh, you know, the ways of working and how this is, this is built. It really lends itself to, to build that step by step and worry about some stuff later and just do it. Um, yeah, piecemeal, >>This is Al is also a new market for you. It's your first real business to consumer facing application. That's that implies a very different approach to experience design, uh, to how you >>And performance yeah, >>Yeah. Perform exactly. Uh, how did your development team adapt to that? >>Um, well, there's, there's, you know, certain things that you build into the process, like integration, testing, automated integration testing, where the application just gets checked right after you check in your software. Um, we built in low testing to, you know, we have an idea of how many transactions per second, there will be. And so the low testing takes care of that as well. Um, and that is easier if you have a small piece of software instead of the whole monolith that we usually have. And so you, we are able to, to build it quicker and get it out quick in, in hours. >>How, how have you, um, accessed customer feedback, you do your, you know, net promoter score surveys, what, what's the been the customer reaction, your, your consumer >>Reaction? Um, they, they, I mean, I'm kind of the wrong guy to talk to, to, uh, about <laugh> to >>Talk about, come on the architected, the thing. >>Yeah, I, I did. And, and then the feedback has been, it's been very good so far, uh, and we are pretty happy with it. Uh, it's it's running, uh, very well. Um, I don't quite know how they got there. Our customer does, uh, you know, uh, questionnaires and, and stuff like that. Yeah. We have a, a different depart, uh, department to, to solicit feedback on that. But from what I hear, uh, it's, it's received very well. >>One of the cloud native features, I understand you used extensively with APIs, uh, for integrations. How are you making this application accessible to partners? What, I mean, what are you exposing? How will you use those APIs to enhance the value through, through an ecosystem of >>Partners? Um, well, we document them, um, and so they're out there to use. And as long as there's a, um, a security process within, um, em that we have in front of it, um, they're open source, um, APIs. So, uh, as I said, they have other programs that they wrote themselves or that they bought that are able to use those APIs, um, from an open API document. Uh, and, and just interact with that as long as the user is, uh, authenticated, they're able to, to get this data and show it in a different context and use it in a different context. >>Did you play golf? >>Um, I used to time ago, not anymore. >>Now, do you know what a Mulligan is? Yes, I did. Okay. If you had a Mulligan, you'd do this all over again. What, what would you do differently? >>Um, an interesting question. I, don't not sure. Um, you, you say you're smarter after, after you've done that. Yeah. And, and of course there's, uh, there's, there, there there's certainly were things that I didn't expect that would happen. Um, like how, how really you need to go modular and on, on everything and need your own resource and infrastructure. Um, because we came from a very centralized, um, uh, scope. We had a database that is a big DB database, um, and now we're going into smaller database and not decentralized a lot. Um, and that was something that the extent of it, I didn't expect, I, I wanted to use more smaller things. And, and that was something that we very quickly learned that no, we need really need to separate stuff out. >>Was that an organizational sort of mindset shift? Um, are you, are you rethinking or rearchitecting your data, um, your data architecture as part of that, or is that more, or is this more just sort of tactical for this app? >>Um, no, we're definitely need to need to do this because, uh, it really gets, um, or it really is a, um, something to handle a, a big pool of data is, is really a challenge or can be a challenge at times >>To scale, >>To, to, to scale that up. Right. Yeah. Um, and so, yeah, we are going to, to separate that out and double some data. That's, that's gonna be a thing it's gonna be more data at the end, but since it's scaled out and, and decentralized, that will >>Help a lot of organizations would say, well, we wanna keep it centralized monolithic, which is kind of a negative term, but I think it's true, uh, because it's more cost effective. We're not gonna duplicate things as much. We're gonna have roles that are dedicated, but it sounds like you're seeing a business advantage of distributing those functions, decentralizing those functions to a >>Extent, right, right. Because if you, if you have a centralized Mon monolith, then it, I, yeah, it might be negative, but it really is. It's a good working software. Um, but to have that, it's, um, it's really hard to release new features and new, new, you know, even buck fixes it, it just takes time. It, it is, uh, uh, a time consuming process. And if you have it decentralized and in smaller packages, you can just do, Afix run it through the pipeline, have the testing done and just put that out within hours. >>How important was it to bit more to build this application on an open source platform? >>Um, the open source didn't come so much in our perspective of things, or we didn't consider it that much. It was just, this is there. This works. We have a good support behind that. Um, we are, our, our coach is not open sourced, then we're not going to anytime soon tell about it. Um, we're actually thinking about having parts that might be, uh, a kind of open source dish, uh, just in the healthcare community kind of thing. Um, but, uh, yeah, no, that didn't F factor in as much. Um, it was just something that we had >>Experienced another architecture question. So you've got the application stack, right. If I can use that term, although application development tools that you build use to build the application, and then you've got the data that the application needs, how are those architected, are they sort of separate entities? Are they coming together? >>Um, we used to have, we used to have, uh, uh, data, um, net a, a, um, an MDA approach, a J hue. Um, so they're very strong connected. That is, there's just in the database. There are models and entities that we use in the, in the JBO. Um, and well, we're still gonna use hibernate to, to, uh, to do the G GPA, but it's, uh, yeah, it's something that needs to be restructured because it just takes a lot of resources to manage data from different parts of the application, bringing them together, um, that will, will need to change. >>And what about new data sources? If I came to and say, Sebastian, I need to inject new data into the, the app. I need to get this to how, how, how difficult or, or fast easy is that, >>Uh, now in the, in the world now, or actually we wanna >>Compare, can you compare before and now, I mean, it wouldn' have to happen before would be >>Like, in the time in the timeframe it's, it's, it's not, it's hard to say. I mean, but if you have a project right now, we're talking, uh, months, um, like a year to, to get it done, get it tested, and then it even takes, um, up to a month to before it's out to every customer. Yeah. The rollout process takes some time. Yeah. Um, and we're planning on, or we, we developed the new, uh, the new software we developed in a couple of months. Uh, and then it is deployed and then it's in production and it's in production for all the customers that wanted to use it for now. I mean, it's not deployed to all customers yet, uh, because they need to adapt it and in their way. Um, but they have it, you know, it's, it's right there. It's deployed. Yeah. When we fix it, it's in a, you know, hours, couple days it's out and it's out in production, in different data centers for different customers. >>And we've come full circle the life of a, of an architect. It's, uh, it sounds like it's much better today. Sebastian, thanks so much for coming to the cube. Appreciate your time and your insights. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there that you watching the Cube's coverage of red hat summit, 2022 from Boston, Dave Valante for Paul Gillon, we'll be right back.

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson, day four of MWC '23. Show's winding down a little bit, but it's still pretty packed here. Lot of innovation, planes, trains, automobiles, and we're talking 5G all week, private networks, connected breweries. It's super exciting. Really happy to have Warren Jackson here as the Edge Gateway Product Technologist at Dell Technologies, and Scott Waller, the CTO of the 5G Open Innovation Lab. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. >> Good to be here. >> Really interesting stories that we're going to talk about. Let's start, Scott, with you, what is the Open Innovation Lab? >> So it was hatched three years ago. Ideated about a bunch of guys from Microsoft who ran startup ventures program, started the developers program over at Microsoft, if you're familiar with MSDN. And they came three years ago and said, how does CSPs working with someone like T-Mobile who's in our backyard, I'm from Seattle. How do they monetize the edge? You need a developer ecosystem of applications and use cases. That's always been the thing. The carriers are building the networks, but where's the ecosystem of startups? So we built a startup ecosystem that is sponsored by partners, Dell being one sponsor, Intel, Microsoft, VMware, Aspirant, you name it. The enterprise folks who are also in the connectivity business. And with that, we're not like a Y Combinator or a Techstars where it's investment first and it's all about funding. It's all about getting introductions from a startup who might have a VR or AI type of application or observability for 5G slicing, and bring that in front of the Microsoft's of the world, or the Intel's and the Dell's of the world that they might not have the capabilities to do it because they're still a small little startup with an MVP. So we really incubate. We're the connectors and build a network. We've had 101 startups over the last three years. They've raised over a billion dollars. And it's really valuable to our partners like T-Mobile and Dell, et cetera, where we're bringing in folks like Expedo and GenXComm and Firecell. Start up private companies that are around here they were cohorts from our program in the past. >> That's awesome because I've often, I mean, I've seen Dell get into this business and I'm like, wow, they've done a really good job of finding these guys. I wonder what the pipeline is. >> We're trying to create the pipeline for the entire industry, whether it's 5G on the edge for the CSPs, or it's for private enterprise networks. >> Warren, what's this cool little thing you got here? >> Yeah, so this is very unique in the Dell portfolio. So when people think of Dell, they think of servers laptops, et cetera. But what this does is it's designed to be deployed at the edge in harsh environments and it allows customers to do analytics, data collection at the edge. And what's unique about it is it's got an extended temperature range. There's no fan in this and there's lots of ports on it for data ingestion. So this is a smaller box Edge Gateway 3200. This is the product that we're using in the brewery. And then we have a bigger brother of this, the Edge Gateway 5200. So the value of it, you can scale depending on what your edge compute requirements are at the edge. >> So tell us about the brewery story. And you covered it, I know you were in the Dell booth, but it's basically an analog brewery. They're taking measurements and temperatures and then writing it down and then entering it in and somebody from your company saw it and said, "We can help you with this problem." Explain the story. >> Yeah, so Scott and I did a walkthrough of the brewery back in November timeframe. >> It's in Framingham, Mass. >> Framingham, Mass, correct. And basically, we talked to him, and we said, what keeps you guys up at night? What's a problem that we can solve? Very simple, a kind of a lower budget, didn't have a lot money to spend on it, but what problem can we solve that will realize great benefit for you? So we looked at their fermentation process, which was completely analog. Somebody was walking around with a clipboard looking at analog gauges. And what we did is we digitized that process. So what this did for them rather than being completely reactive, and by the time they realized there was something going wrong with the fermentation process, it's too late. A batch of scrap. This allowed them to be proactive. So anytime, anywhere on the tablet or a phone, they can see if that fermentation process is going out of range and do something about it before the batch gets scrapped. >> Okay. Amazing. And Scott, you got a picture of this workflow here? >> Yeah, actually this is the final product. >> Explain that. >> As Warren mentioned, the data is actually residing in the industrial side of the network So we wanted to keep the IT/OT separation, which is critical on the factory floor. And so all the data is brought in from the sensors via digital connection once it's converted and into the edge gateway. Then there's a snapshot of it using Telit deviceWISE, their dashboarding application, that is decoding all the digital readings, putting them in a nice dashboard. And then when we gave them, we realized another problem was they're using cheap little Chromebooks that they spill beer on once a week and throw them out. That's why they bought the cheap ones 'cause they go through them so fast. So we got a Dell Latitude Rugged notebook. This is a brand new tablet, but they have the dashboarding software. So no matter if they're out there on the floor, but because the data resides there on the factory they have access to be able to change the parameters. This one's in the maturation cycle. This one's in the crashing cycle where they're bringing the temperature back down, stopping the fermentation process, getting it ready to go to the canning side of the house. >> And they're doing all that from this dashboard. >> They're doing all from the dashboard. They also have a giant screen that we put up there that in the floor instead of walking a hundred yards back behind a whole bunch of machinery equipment from a safety perspective, now they just look up on the screen and go, "Oh, that's red. That's out of range." They're actually doing a bunch of cleaning and a bunch of other things right now, too. So this is real time from Boston. >> Dave: Oh okay. >> Scott: This is actually real time from Boston. >> I'm no hop master, but I'm looking at these things flashing at me and I'm thinking something's wrong with my beer. >> We literally just lit this up last week. So we're still tweaking a few things, but they're also learning around. This is a new capability they never had. Oh, we have the ability to alert and monitor at different processes with different batches, different brews, different yeast types. Then now they're also training and learning. And we're going to turn that into eventually a product that other breweries might be able to use. >> So back to the kind of nuts and bolts of the system. The device that you have here has essentially wifi antennas on the back. >> Warren: Correct. >> Pull that up again if you would, please. >> Now I've seen this, just so people are clear, there are also paddle 5G antennas that go on the other side. >> Correct. >> That's sort of the connection from the 5G network that then gets transmogrified, technical term guys, into wifi so the devices that are physically connected to the brew vats, don't know what they're called. >> Fermentation tanks. >> Fermentation tanks, thank you. Those are wifi. That's a wifi signal that's going into this. Is that correct? >> Scott: No. >> No, it's not. >> It's a hard wire. >> Okay, okay. >> But, you're right. This particular gateway. >> It could be wifi if it's hard wire. >> It could be, yes. Could be any technology really. >> This particular gateway is not outfitted with 5G, but something that was very important in this application was to isolate the IT network, which is on wifi and physically connected from the OT network, which is the 5G connection. So we're sending the data directly from the gateway up to the cloud. The two partners that we worked with on this project were ifm, big sensor manufacturer that actually did the wired sensors into an industrial network called IO-Link. So they're physically wired into the gateway and then in the gateway we have a solution from our partner Telit that has deviceWISE software that actually takes the data in, runs the analytics on it, the logic, and then visualizes that data locally on those panels and also up to their cloud, which is what we're looking at. So they can look at it locally, they're in the plant and then up in the cloud on a phone or a tablet, whatever, when they're at home. >> We're talking about a small business here. I don't know how many employees they have, but it's not thousands. And I love that you're talking about an IT network and an OT network. And so they wanted, it is very common when we talk about industrial internet of things use cases, but we're talking about a tiny business here. >> Warren: Correct. >> They wanted to separate those networks because of cost, because of contention. Explain why. >> Yeah, just because, I mean, they're running their ERP system, their payroll, all of their kind of the way they run their business on their IT network and you don't want to have the same traffic out on the factory floor on that network, so it was pretty important. And the other thing is we really, one of the things that we didn't want to do in this project is interrupt their production process at all. So we installed this entire system in two days. They didn't have to shut down, they didn't have to stop. We didn't have to interrupt their process at all. It was like we were invisible there and we spun the thing up and within two days, very simple, easy, but tremendous value for their business. >> Talk about new markets here. I mean, it's like any company that's analog that needs to go digital. It's like 99% of the companies on the planet. What are you guys seeing out there in terms of the types of examples beyond breweries? >> Yeah, I could talk to that. So I spent a lot of time over the last couple years running my own little IoT company and a lot of it being in agriculture. So like in Washington state, 70% of the world's hops is actually grown in Washington state. It's my hometown. But in the Ag producing regions, there's lack of connectivity. So there's interest in private networks because the carriers aren't necessarily deploying it. But because we have the vast amount of hops there's a lot of IPAs, a lot of hoppy IPAs that come out of Seattle. And with that, there's a ton of craft breweries that are about the same size, some are a little larger. Anheuser-Busch and InBev and Heineken they've got great IoT platforms. They've done it. They're mass scale, they have to digitize. But the smaller shops, they don't, when we talk about IT/OT separation, they're not aware of that. They think it's just, I get local broadband and I get wifi and one hotspot inside my facility and it works. So a little bit of it was the education. I have got years in IT/OT security in my background so that education and we come forward with a solution that actually does that for them. And now they're aware of it. So now when they're asking questions of other vendors that are trying to sell them some type of solution, they're inherently aware of what should be done so they're not vulnerable to ransomware attacks, et cetera. So it's known as the Purdue Model. >> Well, what should they do? >> We came in and keep it completely separated and educated them because in the end too we'll build a design guide and a starter kit out of this that other brewers can use. Because I've toured dozens of breweries in Washington, the exact same scenario, analog gauges, analog process, very manual. And in the end, when you ask the brewer, what do they want out of this? It keeps them up at night because if the temperature goes out of range, because the chiller fails, >> They ruined. >> That's $30,000 lost in beer. That's a lot to a small business. However, it's also once they start digitizing the data and to Warren's point, it's read-only. We're not changing any of the process. We augmented on top of their existing systems. We didn't change their process. But now they have the ability to look at the data and see batch to batch consistency. Quality doesn't always mean best, it means consistency from batch to batch. Every beer from exhibit A from yesterday to two months from now of the same style of beer should be the same taste, flavor, boldness, et cetera. This is giving them the insights on it. >> It's like St. Louis Buds, when we were kids. We would buy the St. Louis Buds 'cause they tasted better than the Merrimack Buds. And then Budweiser made them all the same. >> Must be an East coast thing. >> It's an old guy thing, Dave. You weren't born yet. >> I was in high school. Yeah, I was in high school. >> We like the hops. >> We weren't 21. Do me a favor, clarify OT versus IT. It's something we talk about all the time, but not everyone's familiar with that separation. Define OT for me. >> It's really the factory floor. You got IT systems that are ERP systems, billing, you're getting your emails, stuff like that. Where the ransomware usually gets infected in. The OT side is the industrial control network. >> David: What's the 'O' stand for? >> Operation. >> David: Operation? >> Yeah, the operations side. >> 'Cause some people will think objects 'cause we think internet of things. >> The industrial operations, think of it that way. >> But in a sense those are things that are connected. >> And you think of that as they are the safety systems as well. So a machine, if someone doesn't push the stop button, you'd think if there's a lot of traffic on that network, it isn't guaranteed that that stop button actually stops that blade from coming down, someone's going to lose their arm. So it's very tied to safety, reliability, low latency. It is crafted in design that it never touches the internet inherently without having to go through a security gateway which is what we did. >> You mentioned the large companies like InBev, et cetera. You're saying they're already there. Are they not part of your target market? Or are there ways that you can help them? Is this really more of a small to mid-size company? >> For this particular solution, I think so, yeah. Because the cost to entry is low. I mean, you talk about InBev, they have millions of dollars of budgets to spend on OT. So they're completely automated from top to bottom. But these little craft brewers, which they're everywhere in the US. Vermont, Washington state, they're completely manual. A lot of these guys just started in their garage. And they just scaled up and they got a cult kind of following around their beers. One thing that we found here this week, when you talk around edge and 5G and beer, those things get people excited. In our booth we're serving beer, and all these kind of topics, it brings people together. >> And it lets the little guy compete more effectively with the big giants. >> Correct. >> And how do you do more with less as the little guy is kind of the big thing and to Warren's point, we have folks come up and say, "Great, this is for beer, but what about wine? What about the fermentation process of wine?" Same materials in the end. A vessel of some sort, maybe it's stainless steel. The clamps are the same, the sensors are the same. The parameters like temperature are key in any type of fermentation. We had someone talking about olive oil and using that. It's the same sanitary beverage style equipment. We grabbed sensors that were off the shelf and then we integrated them in and used the set of platforms that we could. How do we rapidly enable these guys at the lowest possible cost with stuff that's at the shelf. And there's four different companies in the solution. >> We were having a conversation with T-Mobile a little earlier and she mentioned the idea of this sounding scary. And this is a great example of showing that in fact, at a relatively small scale, this technology makes a lot of sense. So from that perspective, of course you can implement private 5G networks at an industrial scale with tens of millions of dollars of investment. But what about all of the other things below? And that seems to be a perfect example. >> Yeah, correct. And it's one of the things with the gateway and having flexibility the way Dell did a great job of putting really good modems in it. It had a wide spectrum range of what bands they support. So being able to say, at a larger facility, I mean, if Heineken wants to deploy something like this, oh, heck yeah, they probably could do it. And they might have a private 5G network, but let's say T-Mobile offers a private offering on their public via a slice. It's easy to connect that radio to it. You just change the sims. >> Is that how the CSPs fit here? How are they monetized? >> Yeah, correct. So one of our partners is T-Mobile and so we're working with them. We've got other telco partners that are coming on board in our lab. And so we'll do the same thing. We're going to take this back and put it in the lab and offer it up as others because the baseline building blocks or Lego blocks per se can be used in a bunch of different industries. It's really that starter point of giving folks the idea of what's possible. >> So small manufacturing, agriculture you mentioned, any other sort of use cases we should tune into? >> I think it's environmental monitoring, all of that stuff, I see it in IoT deployments all over the world. Just the simple starter kits 'cause a farmer doesn't want to get sold a solution, a platform, where he's got to hire a bunch of coders and partner with the big carriers. He just wants something that works. >> Another use case that we see a lot, a high cost in a lot of these places is the cost of energy. And a lot of companies don't know what they're spending on electricity. So a very simple energy monitoring system like that, it's a really good ROI. I'm going to spend five or $10,000 on a system like this, but I'm going to save $20,000 over a year 'cause I'm able to see, have visibility into that data. That's a lot of what this story's about, just giving visibility into the process. >> It's very cool, and like you said, it gets people excited. Is it a big market? How do you size it? Is it a big TAM? >> Yeah, so one thing that Dell brings to the table in this space is people are buying their laptops, their servers and whatnot from Dell and companies are comfortable in doing business with Dell because of our model direct to customer and whatnot. So our ability to bring a device like this to the OT space and have them have that same user experience they have with laptops and our client products in a ruggedized solution like this and bring a lot of partners to the table makes it easy for our customers to implement this across all kinds of industries. >> So we're talking to billions, tens of billions. Do we know how big this market is? What's the TAM? I mean, come on, you work for Dell. You have to do a TAM analysis. >> Yes, no, yeah. I mean, it really is in the billions. The market is huge for this one. I think we just tapped into it. We're kind of focused in on the brewery piece of it and the liquor piece of it, but the possibilities are endless. >> Yeah, that's tip of the spear. Guys, great story. >> It's scalable. I think the biggest thing, just my final feedback is working and partnering with Dell is we got something as small as this edge gateway that I can run a Packet Core on and run a 5G standalone node and then have one of the small little 5G radios out there. And I've got these deployed in a farm. Give the farmer an idea of what's possible, give him a unit on his tractor, and now he can do something that, we're providing connectivity he had never had before. But as we scale up, we've got the big brother to this. When we scale up from that, we got the telco size units that we can put. So it's very scalable. It's just a great suite of offerings. >> Yeah, outstanding. Guys, thanks for sharing the story. Great to have you on theCUBE. >> Good to be with you today. >> Stop by for beer later. >> You know it. All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and the entire CUBE team, we're here live at the Fira in Barcelona MWC '23 day four. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>Hey guys. Welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here live with the cube at Coan Cloud Native Con North America. John, it's been a great day. This is day one of our coverage of three days of coverage. Kubernetes is growing up. Yeah, it's maturing. >>Yeah. We got three days of wall to wall coverage, all about Kubernetes. We about security, large scale, cloud native at scale. That's the big focus. This next segment's gonna be really awesome. You have a fast growing private company and a practitioner, big name, blue chip practitioner, building out next NextGen Cloud first, transforming, then building out the next level. This is classic of what we call super cloud-like, like interview. It's gonna be great. I'm looking forward >>To this anytime we can talk about Super Cloud. All right, please welcome back. One of our alumni, Bani is here, the CEO of Rafe. Great to see you Santos. Ula also joins us, the global head of Cloud SRE at Mass Mutual. Ge. Great to have you on the program. Thanks >>For having us. Thank you for having me. >>So Steve, you've been on the queue many times. You were on just recently with the momentum that that's around us today with the maturation of Kubernetes, the collaboration of the community, the recognition of the community. What are some of the things that you're excited about with on, on day one of the show? >>Wow, so many new companies. I mean, there are companies that I don't know who are here. And I, I, I live in this industry and I'm seeing companies that I don't know, which is a good thing. I mean, it means that the, the community's growing. But at the same time, I'm also seeing another thing, which is I have met more enterprise representatives at this show than other coupons. Like when we hung out at, you know, in Valencia for example, or even, you know, other places. It hasn't been this many people, which means, and this is, this is a good thing that enterprises are now taking Kubernetes seriously. It's not a toy. It's not just for developers. It's enterprises who are now investing in Kubernetes as a foundational component, right. For their applications going forward. And that to me is very, very good. >>Definitely becoming foundational. >>Yep. Well, you guys got a great traction. We had many interviews at the Cube and you got a practitioner here with you. You guys are both pioneering kind of what I call the next gen cloud. First you gotta get through gen one, which you guys done at Mass Mutual, extremely well, take us through the story of your transformation. Cause you're on the, at the front end now of that next inflection point. But take us through how you got here. You had a lot of transformation success at Mass Mutual. >>So I was actually talking about this topic few, few minutes back, right? And, and the whole cloud journey in big companies, large financial institutions, healthcare industry or, or our insurance sector. It takes generations of leadership to get, to get to that perfection level. And, and ideally the, the, the cloud for strategy starts in, and then, and then how do you, how do you standardize and optimize cloud, right? You know, that that's, that's the second gen altogether. And then operationalization of the cloud. And especially if, you know, if you're talking about Kubernetes, you know, in the traditional world, you know, almost every company is running middleware and their applications in middleware. And then containerization is a topic that come, that came in. And docker is, is you know, basically the runtime containerization. So that came in first and from Docker, you know, eventually when companies started adopting Docker, Docker Swarm is one of the technologies that they adopted. And eventually when, when, when we were taking it to a more complicated application implementations or modernization efforts, that's when Kubernetes played a key role. And, and Hasi was pointing out, you know, like you never saw so many companies working on Kubernetes. So that should tell you one story, right? How fast Kubernetes is growing and how important it is for your cloud strategy. So, >>And your success now, and what are you thinking about now? What's on your agenda now as you look forward? What's on your plate? What are you guys doing right now? >>So we are, we are past the stage of, you know, proof of concepts, proof of technologies, pilot implementations. We are actually playing it, you know, the real game now. So in the past I used the quote, you know, like, hello world to real world. So we are actually playing in the real world, not, not in the hello world anymore. Now, now this is where the real time challenges will, will pop up, right? So if you're talking about standardizing it and then optimizing the cloud and how do you put your governance structure in place? How do you make sure your regulations are met? You know, the, the, the demands that come out of regulations are met and, and how, how are you going to scale it and, and, and while scaling, however you wanna to keep up with all the governance and regulations that come with it. So we are in that stage today. >>Has Steve talked about, you talked about the great evolution of what's going on at Mass Mutual has talked a little bit about who, you mentioned one of the things that's surprising you about this Coan and Detroit is that you're seeing a lot more enterprise folks here who, who's deciding in the organization and your customer conversations, Who are the deci decision makers in terms of adoption of Kubernetes these days? Is that elevating? >>Hmm. Well this guy, >>It's usually, you know, one of the things I'm seeing here, and John and I have talked about this in the past, this idea of a platform organization and enterprises. So consistently what I'm seeing is, you know, somebody, a cto, CIO level, you know, individual is making a determin decision. I have multiple internal buss who are now modernizing applications. They're individually investing in DevOps. And this is not a good investment for my business. I'm going to centralize some of this capability so that we can all benefit together. And that team is essentially a platform organization and they're making Kubernetes a shared services platform so that everybody else can come and, and, and sort of, you know, consume it. So what that means to us is our customer is a platform organization and their customer is a developer. So we have to make two constituencies successful. Our customer who's providing a multi-tenant platform, and then their customer who's a developer, both have to be happy. If you don't solve for both, you know, constituencies, you're not gonna be >>Successful. You're targeting the builder of the infrastructure and the consumer of that infrastructure. >>Yes sir. It has to be both. Exactly. Right. Right. So, so that look, honestly, that it, it, you know, it takes iterations to figure these things out, right? But this is a consistent theme that I am seeing. In fact, what I would argue now is that every enterprise should be really stepping back and thinking about what is my platform strategy. Cuz if you don't have a platform strategy, you're gonna have a bunch of different teams who are doing different things and some will be successful and look, some will not be. And that is not good for business. >>Yeah. And, and stage, I wanna get to you, you mentioned that your transformation was what you look forward and your title, global head of cloud sre. Okay, so sre, we all know came from Google, right? Everyone wants to be like Google, but no one wants to be like Google, right? And no one is Google, Google's a unique thing. It's only one Google. But they had the dynamic and the power dynamic of one person to large scale set of servers or infrastructure. But concept is, is, is can be portable, but, but the situation isn't. So board became Kubernetes, that's inside baseball. So you're doing essentially what Google did at their scale you're doing for Mass Mutual. That's kind of what's happening. Is that kind of how I see it? And you guys are playing in there partnering. >>So I I totally agree. Google introduce, sorry, Ty engineering. And, and if you take, you know, the traditional transformation of the roles, right? In the past it was called operations and then DevOps ops came in and then SRE is is the new buzzword. And the future could be something like product engineering, right? And, and, and in this journey, you know, here is what I tell, you know, folks on my side like what worked for Google might not work for a financial company, might not work for an insurance company. So, so, so it's, it's okay to use the word sre, but but the end of the day that SRE has to be tailored down to, to your requirements and and, and the customers that you serve and the technology that you serve. Yep. >>And this is, this is why I'm coming back, this platform engineering. At the end of the day, I think SRE just translates to, you're gonna have a platform engineering team cuz you gotta enable developers to be producing more code faster, better, cheaper guardrails policy. So this, it's kind of becoming the, you serve the business, which is now the developers it used to serve the business Yep. Back in the old days. Hey, the, it serves the business. Yep. Which is a terminal, >>Which is actually true >>Now it the new, it serves the developers, which is the business. Which is the business. Because if digital transformation goes to completion, the company is the app. Yep. >>And the, you know, the, the hard line between development and operations, right? So, so that's thining down over the time, you know, like that that line might disappear. And, and, and that's where asari is fitting in. >>Yeah. And they're building platforms to scale the enablement up that what is, so what is the key challenges you guys are, are both building out together this new transformational direction? What's new and what's the same, The same is probably the business results, but what's the new dynamic involved in rolling it out and making people successful? You got the two constituents, the builders of the infrastructures and the consumers of the services on the other side. What's the new thing? >>So the new thing if, if I may go fast these, so the faster market to, you know, value, right? That we are bringing to the table. That's, that's very important. You know, business has an idea. How do you get that idea implemented in terms of technology and, and take it into real time. So that journey we have cut down, right? Technology is like Kubernetes. It makes, it makes, you know, an IT person's life so easy that, that they can, they can speed up the process in, in, in a traditional way. What used to take like an year or six months can be done in a month today or or less than that, right? So, so there's definitely the losses, speed, velocity, agility in general, and then flexibility. And then the automation that we put in, especially if you have to maintain like thousands of clusters, you know, these, these are today like, you know, it is possible to, to make that happen with a click off a button. In the past it used to take like, you know, probably, you know, a hundred, a hundred percent team and operational team to do it. And a lot of time. But, but, but that automation is happening. You know, and we can get into the technology as much as possible. But, but, you know, blueprinting and all that stuff made >>It possible. Well say that for another interview, we'll do it take time. >>But the, the end user on the other end, the consumer doesn't have the patience that they once had. Right? Right. It's, I want this in my lab now. Now, how does the culture of Mass Mutual, how is it evolv to be able to deliver the velocity that your customers are demanding? >>So if once in a while, you know, it's important to step yourself into the customer's shoes and think it from their, from their, from their perspective, business does not care how you're running your IT shop. What they care about is your stability of the product and the efficiencies of the product and, and, and how, how, how easy it is to reach out to the customers and how well we are serving the customers, right? So whether I'm implementing Docker in the background, Dr. Swam or es you know, business doesn't even care about it. What they really care about it is if your environment goes down, it's a problem. And, and, and if you, if your environment or if your solution is not as efficient as the business needs, that's the problem, right? So, so at that point, the business will step in. So our job is to make sure, you know, from an, from a technology perspective, how fast you can make implement it and how efficiently you can implement it. And at the same time, how do you play within the guardrails of security and compliance. >>So I was gonna ask you if you have VMware in your environment, cause a lot of clients compare what vCenter does for Kubernetes is really needed. And I think that's what you guys got going on. I I can say that you're the v center of Kubernetes. I mean, as a, as an as an metaphor, a place to manage it all is all 1, 1 1 paint of glass, so to speak. Is that how you see success in your environment? >>So virtualization has gone a long way, you know where we started, what we call bare metal servers, and then we virtualized operating systems. Now we are virtualizing applications and, and we are virtualizing platforms as well, right? So that's where Kubernetes basically got. >>So you see the need for a vCenter like thing for Uber, >>Definitely a need in the market in the way you need to think is like, you know, let's say there is, there is an insurance company who actually mented it and, and they gain the market advantage. Right? Now the, the the competition wants to do it as well, right? So, so, so there's definitely a virtualization of application layer that, that, that's very critical and it's, it's a critical component of cloud strategy as >>A whole. See, you're too humble to say it. I'll say you like the V center of Kubernetes, Explain what that means and your turn. If I said that to you, what would you react? How would you react to that? Would say bs or would you say on point, >>Maybe we should think about what does vCenter do today? Right? It's, it's so in my opinion, by the way, well vCenter in my opinion is one of the best platforms ever built. Like ha it's the best platform in my opinion ever built. It's, VMware did an amazing job because they took an IT engineer and they made him now be able to do storage management, networking management, VMs, multitenancy, access management audit, everything that you need to run a data center, you can do from a single, essentially single >>Platform, from a utility standpoint home >>Run. It's amazing, right? Yeah, it is because you are now able to empower people to do way more. Well why are we not doing that for Kubernetes? So the, the premise man Rafa was, well, oh, bless, I should have IT engineers, same engineers now they should be able to run fleets of clusters. That's what people that mass major are able to do now, right? So to that end, now you need cluster management, you need access management, you need blueprinting, you need policy management, you need ac, you know, all of these things that have happened before chargebacks, they used to have it in, in V center. Now they need to happen in other platforms. But for es so should do we do many of the things that vCenter does? Yes. >>Kind >>Of. Yeah. Are we a vCenter for es? Yeah, that is a John Forer question. >>All right, well, I, I'll, the speculation really goes back down to the earlier speed question. If you can take away the, the complexity and not make it more steps or change a tool chain or do something, then the devs move faster and the service layer that serves the business, the new organization has to enable speed. So this, this is becoming a, a real discussion point in the industry is that, oh yeah, we've got new tool, look at the shiny new toy. But if it doesn't move the needle, does it help productivity for developers? And does it actually scale up the enablement? That's the question. So I'm sure you guys are thinking about this a lot, what's your reaction? >>Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that just, you know, hit my mind is think about, you know, the hoteling industry before Airbnb and after Airbnb, right? Or, or, or the taxi industry, you know, before Uber and after Uber, right? So if I'm providing a platform, a Kubernetes platform for my application folks or for my application partners, they have everything ready. All they need to do is like, you know, build their application and deployed and running, right? They, they, they don't have to worry about provisioning of the servers and then building the middleware on top of it and then, you know, do a bunch of testing to make sure, you know, they, they, they iron out all the, all the compatible issues and whatnot. Yeah. Now, now, today, all I, all I say is like, hey, you have, we have a platform built for you. You just build your application and then deploy it in a development environment. That's where you put all the pieces of puzzle together, make sure you see your application working, and then the next thing that, that you do is like, you know, you know, build >>Production, chip, build production, go and chip release it. Yeah, that's the nirvana. But then we're there. I mean, we're there now we're there. So we see the future. Because if you, if that's the case, then the developers are the business. They have to be coding more features, they have to react to customers. They might see new business opportunities from a revenue standpoint that could be creatively built, got low code, no code, headless systems. These things are happening where this I call the architectural list environment where it's like, you don't need architecture, it's already happening. >>Yeah. And, and on top of it, you know, if, if someone has an idea, they want to implement an idea real quick, right? So how do you do it? Right? And, and, and you don't have to struggle building an environment to implement your idea and testers in real time, right? So, so from an innovation perspective, you know, agility plays a key role. And, and that, that's where the Kubernetes platforms or platforms like Kubernetes >>Plays. You know, Lisa, when we talked to Andy Chasy, when he was the CEO of aws, either one on one or on the cube, he always said, and this is kind of happening, companies are gonna be builders where it's not just utility. You need that table stakes to enable that new business idea. And so he, this last keynote, he did this big thing like, you know, think like your developers are the next entrepreneurial revenue generators. And I think that, I think starting to see that, what do you think about that? You see that coming sooner than later? Or is that in, in sight or is that still ways away? >>I, I think it's already happening at a level, at a certain level now. Now the question comes back to, you know, taking it to the reality, right? Yeah. I mean, you can, you can do your proof of concept, proof of technologies, and then, and then prove it out. Like, Hey, I got a new idea. This idea is great. Yeah. And, and it's to the business advantage, right? But we really want to see it in production live where your customers are actually >>Using it and the board meetings, Hey, we got a new idea that came in, generating more revenue, where'd that come from? Agile developer. Again, this is real. Yeah, >>Yeah. >>Absolutely agree. Yeah. I think, think both of you gentlemen said a word in, in your, as you were talking, you used the word guardrails, right? I think, you know, we're talking about rigidity, but you know, the really important thing is, look, these are enterprises, right? They have certain expectations. Guardrails is key, right? So it's automation with the guardrails. Yeah. Guardrails are like children, you know, you know, shouldn't be hurt. You know, they're seen but not hurt. Developers don't care about guard rails. They just wanna go fast. They also bounce >>Around a little bit. Yeah. Off the guardrails. >>One thing we know that's not gonna slow down is, is the expectations, right? Of all the consumers of this, the Ds the business, the, the business top line, and of course the customers. So the ability to, to really, as your website says, let's see, make life easy for platform teams is not trivial. And clearly what you guys are talking about here is you're, you're really an enabler of those platform teams, it sounds like to me. Yep. So, great work, guys. Thank you so much for both coming on the program, talking about what you're doing together, how you're seeing the, the evolution of Kubernetes, why, and really what the focus should be on those platform games. We appreciate all your time and your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us. Thanks >>For our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live, Cobe Con, Cloud Native con from Detroit. We've out with our next guest in just a minute, so stick around.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, guys. Welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here live with "theCUBE" at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America. John, it's been a great day. This is day one of our coverage of three days of coverage. Kubernetes is growing up. It's maturing. >> Yeah, we got three days of wall-to-wall coverage, all about Kubernetes. We heard about Security, Large scale, Cloud native at scale. That's the big focus. This next segment's going to be really awesome. You have a fast growing private company and a practitioner, big name, blue chip practitioner, building out next-gen cloud. First transforming, then building out the next level. This is classic, what we call Super Cloud-Like interview. It's going to be great. I'm looking forward to this. >> Anytime we can talk about Super Cloud, right? Please welcome back, one of our alumni, Haseeb Budhani is here, the CEO of Rafay. Great to see you. Santhosh Pasula, also joins us, the global head of Cloud SRE at Mass Mutual. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, Haseeb, you've been on "theCUBE" many times. You were on just recently, with the momentum that's around us today with the maturation of Kubernetes, the collaboration of the community, the recognition of the community. What are some of the things that you're excited about with on day one of the show? >> Wow, so many new companies. I mean, there are companies that I don't know who are here. And I live in this industry, and I'm seeing companies that I don't know, which is a good thing. It means that the community's growing. But at the same time, I'm also seeing another thing, which is, I have met more enterprise representatives at this show than other KubeCons. Like when we hung out at in Valencia, for example, or even other places, it hasn't been this many people. Which means, and this is a good thing that enterprises are now taking Kubernetes seriously. It's not a toy. It's not just for developers. It's enterprises who are now investing in Kubernetes as a foundational component for their applications going forward. And that to me is very, very good. >> Definitely, becoming foundational. >> Haseeb: Yeah. >> Well, you guys got a great traction. We had many interviews at "theCUBE," and you got a practitioner here with you guys, are both pioneering, kind of what I call the next-gen cloud. First you got to get through Gen-One, which you guys done at Mass Mutual extremely well. Take us through the story of your transformation? 'Cause you're on at the front end now of that next inflection point. But take us through how you got here? You had a lot of transformation success at Mass Mutual? >> So, I was actually talking about this topic few minutes back. And the whole cloud journey in big companies, large financial institutions, healthcare industry or insurance sector, it takes generations of leadership to get to that perfection level. And ideally, the cloud for strategy starts in, and then how do you standardize and optimize cloud, right? That's the second-gen altogether, and then operationalization of the cloud. And especially if you're talking about Kubernetes, in the traditional world, almost every company is running middleware and their applications in middleware. And their containerization is a topic that came in. And Docker is basically the runtime containerization. So, that came in first, and from Docker, eventually when companies started adopting Docker, Docker Swarm is one of the technologies that they adopted. And eventually, when we were taking it to a more complicated application implementations or modernization efforts, that's when Kubernetes played a key role. And as Haseeb was pointing out, you never saw so many companies working on Kubernetes. So, that should tell you one story, right? How fast Kubernetes is growing, and how important it is for your cloud strategy. >> And your success now, and what are you thinking about now? What's on your agenda now? As you look forward, what's on your plate? What are you guys doing right now? >> So we are past the stage of proof of concepts, proof of technologies, pilot implementations. We are actually playing it, the real game now. In the past, I used the quote, like "Hello world to real world." So, we are actually playing in the real world, not in the hello world anymore. Now, this is where the real time challenges will pop up. So, if you're talking about standardizing it, and then optimizing the cloud, and how do you put your governance structure in place? How do you make sure your regulations are met? The demands that come out of regulations are met? And how are you going to scale it? And while scaling, how are you going to keep up with all the governance and regulations that come with it? So we are in that stage today. >> Haseeb talked about, you talked about the great evolution of what's going on at Mass Mutual. Haseeb talk a little bit about who? You mentioned one of the things that's surprising you about this KubeCon in Detroit, is that you're seeing a lot more enterprise folks here? Who's deciding in the organization and your customer conversations? Who are the decision makers in terms of adoption of Kubernetes these days? Is that elevating? >> Hmm. Well, this guy. (Lisa laughing) One of the things I'm seeing here, and John and I have talked about this in the past, this idea of a platform organization and enterprises. So, consistently what I'm seeing, is somebody, a CTO, CIO level, an individual is making a decision. I have multiple internal Bus who are now modernizing applications. They're individually investing in DevOps, and this is not a good investment for my business. I'm going to centralize some of this capability so that we can all benefit together. And that team is essentially a platform organization. And they're making Kubernetes a shared services platform so that everybody else can come and sort of consume it. So, what that means to us, is our customer is a platform organization, and their customer is a developer. So we have to make two constituencies successful. Our customer who's providing a multi-tenant platform, and then their customer, who's your developer, both have to be happy. If you don't solve for both, you know, constituencies, you're not going to be successful. >> So, you're targeting the builder of the infrastructure and the consumer of that infrastructure? >> Yes, sir. It has to be both. >> On the other side? >> Exactly, right. So that look, honestly, it takes iteration to figure these things out. But this is a consistent theme that I am seeing. In fact, what I would argue now, is that every enterprise should be really stepping back and thinking about what is my platform strategy? Because if you don't have a platform strategy, you're going to have a bunch of different teams who are doing different things, and some will be successful, and look, some will not be. And that is not good for business. >> Yeah, and Santhosh, I want to get to you. You mentioned your transformations, what you look forward, and your title, Global Head of Cloud, SRE. Okay, so SRE, we all know came from Google, right? Everyone wants to be like Google, but no one wants to be like Google, right? And no one is Google. Google's a unique thing. >> Haseeb: Only one Google. >> But they had the dynamic and the power dynamic of one person to large scale set of servers or infrastructure. But concept can be portable, but the situation isn't. So, Borg became Kubernetes, that's inside baseball. So, you're doing essentially what Google did at their scale, you're doing for Mass Mutual. That's kind of what's happening, is that kind of how I see it? And you guys are playing in there partnering? >> So, I totally agree. Google introduce SRE, Site Reliability Engineering. And if you take the traditional transformation of the roles, in the past, it was called operations, and then DevOps ops came in, and then SRE is the new buzzword. And the future could be something like Product Engineering. And in this journey, here is what I tell folks on my side, like what worked for Google might not work for a financial company. It might not work for an insurance company. It's okay to use the word, SRE, but end of the day, that SRE has to be tailored down to your requirements. And the customers that you serve, and the technology that you serve. >> This is why I'm coming back, this platform engineering. At the end of the day, I think SRE just translates to, you're going to have a platform engineering team? 'Cause you got to enable developers to be producing more code faster, better, cheaper, guardrails, policies. It's kind of becoming the, these serve the business, which is now the developers. IT used to serve the business back in the old days, "Hey, the IT serves the business." >> Yup. >> Which is a term now. >> Which is actually true now. >> The new IT serves the developers, which is the business. >> Which is the business. >> Because if digital transformation goes to completion, the company is the app. >> The hard line between development and operations, so that's thinning down. Over the time, that line might disappear. And that's where SRE is fitting in. >> Yeah, and then building platform to scale the enablement up. So, what is the key challenges? You guys are both building out together this new transformational direction. What's new and what's the same? The same is probably the business results, but what's the new dynamic involved in rolling it out and making people successful? You got the two constituents, the builders of the infrastructures and the consumers of the services on the other side. What's the new thing? >> So, the new thing, if I may go first. The faster market to value that we are bringing to the table, that's very important. Business has an idea. How do you get that idea implemented in terms of technology and take it into real time? So, that journey we have cut down. Technology is like Kubernetes. It makes an IT person's life so easy that they can speed up the process. In a traditional way, what used to take like an year, or six months, can be done in a month today, or less than that. So, there's definitely speed velocity, agility in general, and then flexibility. And then the automation that we put in, especially if you have to maintain like thousands of clusters. These are today, it is possible to make that happen with a click off a button. In the past, it used to take, probably, 100-person team, and operational team to do it, and a lot of time. But that automation is happening. And we can get into the technology as much as possible, but blueprinting and all that stuff made it possible. >> We'll save that for another interview. We'll do it deep time. (panel laughing) >> But the end user on the other end, the consumer doesn't have the patience that they once had, right? It's, "I want this in my lab now." How does the culture of Mass Mutual? How is it evolve to be able to deliver the velocity that your customers are demanding? >> Once in a while, it's important to step yourself into the customer's shoes and think it from their perspective. Business does not care how you're running your IT shop. What they care about is your stability of the product and the efficiencies of the product, and how easy it is to reach out to the customers. And how well we are serving the customers, right? So, whether I'm implementing Docker in the background, Docker Swam or Kubernetes, business doesn't even care about it. What they really care about, it is, if your environment goes down, it's a problem. And if your environment or if your solution is not as efficient as the business needs, that's the problem, right? So, at that point, the business will step in. So, our job is to make sure, from a technology perspective, how fast you can make implement it? And how efficiently you can implement it? And at the same time, how do you play within the guardrails of security and compliance? >> So, I was going to ask you, if you have VMware in your environment? 'Cause a lot of clients compare what vCenter does for Kubernetes is really needed. And I think that's what you guys got going on. I can say that, you're the vCenter of Kubernetes. I mean, as as metaphor, a place to manage it all, is all one paint of glass, so to speak. Is that how you see success in your environment? >> So, virtualization has gone a long way. Where we started, what we call bare metal servers, and then we virtualized operating systems. Now, we are virtualizing applications, and we are virtualizing platforms as well, right? So that's where Kubernetes plays a role. >> So, you see the need for a vCenter like thing for Kubernetes? >> There's definitely a need in the market. The way you need to think is like, let's say there is an insurance company who actually implement it today, and they gain the market advantage. Now, the the competition wants to do it as well, right? So, there's definitely a virtualization of application layer that's very critical, and it's a critical component of cloud strategy as a whole. >> See, you're too humble to say it. I'll say, you're like the vCenter of Kubernetes. Explain what that means in your term? If I said that to you, what would you react? How would you react to that? Would you say, BS, or would you say on point? >> Maybe we should think about what does vCenter do today? So, in my opinion, by the way, vCenter in my opinion, is one of the best platforms ever built. Like it's the best platform in my opinion ever built. VMware did an amazing job, because they took an IT engineer, and they made him now be able to do storage management, networking management, VM's multitenancy, access management, audit. Everything that you need to run a data center, you can do from essentially single platform. >> John: From a utility standpoint, home-run? >> It's amazing. >> Yeah. >> Because you are now able to empower people to do way more. Well, why are we not doing that for Kubernetes? So, the premise man Rafay was, well, I should have IT engineers, same engineers. Now, they should be able to run fleets of clusters. That's what people that Mass Mutual are able to do now. So, to that end, now you need cluster management, you need access management, you need blueprinting, you need policy management. All of these things that have happened before, chargebacks, they used to have it in vCenter, now they need to happen in other platforms but for Kubernetes. So, should we do many of the things that vCenter does? Yes. >> John: Kind of, yeah. >> Are we a vCenter for Kubernetes? >> No. >> That is a John Furrier question. >> All right, well, the speculation really goes back down to the earlier speed question. If you can take away the complexity and not make it more steps, or change a tool chain, or do something, then the Devs move faster. And the service layer that serves the business, the new organization, has to enable speed. This is becoming a real discussion point in the industry, is that, "Yeah, we got new tool. Look at the shiny new toy." But if it move the needle, does it help productivity for developers? And does it actually scale up the enablement? That's the question. So, I'm sure you guys are thinking about this a lot. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that just hit my mind, is think about the hoteling industry before Airbnb and after Airbnb. Or the taxi industry before Uber and after Uber. So, if I'm providing a platform, a Kubernetes platform for my application folks, or for my application partners, they have everything ready. All they need to do is build their application and deploy it, and run it. They don't have to worry about provisioning of the servers, and then building the Middleware on top of it, and then, do a bunch of testing to make sure they iron out all the compatible issues and whatnot. Now, today, all I say is like, "Hey, we have a platform built for you. You just build your application, and then deploy it in a development environment, that's where you put all the pieces of puzzle together. Make sure you see your application working, and then the next thing that you do is like, do the correction. >> John: Shipping. >> Shipping. You build the production. >> John: Press. Go. Release it. (laughs) That when you move on, but they were there. I mean, we're there now. We're there. So, we need to see the future, because that's the case, then the developers are the business. They have to be coding more features, they have to react to customers. They might see new business opportunities from a revenue standpoint that could be creatively built, got low code, no code, headless systems. These things are happening where there's, I call the Architectural List Environment where it's like, you don't need architecture, it's already happening. >> Yeah, and on top of it, if someone has an idea, they want to implement an idea real quick. So, how do you do it? And you don't have to struggle building an environment to implement your idea and test it in real time. So, from an innovation perspective, agility plays a key role. And that's where the Kubernetes platforms, or platforms like Kubernetes plays. >> You know, Lisa, when we talked to Andy Jassy, when he was the CEO of AWS, either one-on-one or on "theCUBE," he always said, and this is kind of happening, "Companies are going to be builders, where it's not just utility, you need that table stakes to enable that new business idea." And so, in this last keynote, he did this big thing like, "Think like your developers are the next entrepreneurial revenue generators." I think I'm starting to see that. What do you think about that? You see that coming sooner than later? Or is that an insight, or is that still ways away? >> I think it's already happening at a level, at a certain level. Now ,the question comes back to, you know, taking it to the reality. I mean, you can do your proof of concept, proof of technologies, and then prove it out like, "Hey, I got a new idea. This idea is great." And it's to the business advantage. But we really want to see it in production live where your customers are actually using it. >> In the board meetings, "Hey, we got a new idea that came in, generating more revenue, where'd that come from?" Agile Developer. Again, this is real. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Absolutely agree. Yeah, I think both of you gentlemen said a word as you were talking, you used the word, Guardrails. We're talking about agility, but the really important thing is, look, these are enterprises, right? They have certain expectations. Guardrails is key, right? So, it's automation with the guardrails. Guardrails are like children, you know, shouldn't be heard. They're seen but not heard. Developers don't care about guardrails, they just want to go fast. >> They also bounce around a little bit, (laughs) off the guardrails. >> Haseeb: Yeah. >> One thing we know that's not going to slow down, is the expectations, right? Of all the consumers of this, the Devs, the business, the business top line, and, of course, the customers. So, the ability to really, as your website says, let's say, "Make Life Easy for Platform Teams" is not trivial. And clearly what you guys are talking about here, is you're really an enabler of those platform teams, it sounds like to me. >> Yup. >> So, great work, guys. Thank you so much for both coming on the program, talking about what you're doing together, how you're seeing the evolution of Kubernetes, why? And really, what the focus should be on those platform teams. We appreciate all your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" Live, KubeCon CloudNativeCon from Detroit. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute, so stick around. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> And welcome back here on theCUBE. John Walls, your host with you as we continue our IBM Think 2021 initiative. Been talking a lot about IBM's assistance in terms of what it's doing for its client-base. We're going to talk about partnerships today, a little bit with Bill Patterson who is the EVP and General Manager of CRM Applications at Salesforce who has a really good partnership in great practice right now, with IBM. And Bill, thanks for the time today. Lookin' forward to spending some time with you, here. >> Yeah, thank you John, thanks for having me today. >> You bet. Well, let's just jump right in. First off, let's share with the viewers about your core responsibilities at Salesforce. We talked about CRM, what your engagement is there, but if you would just kind of of give us an idea of the kind of things that you're handling on a day-to-day basis. >> Well, I am responsible for our CRM applications here, at Salesforce, which are our sales cloud technologies to help organizations get back to growth, our service cloud technologies which are really helping organizations to take care of their customers, you know, through all moments of the digital lifecycle, our small business solutions, so to help growing organizations thrive, and our Work.com and vaccine management solutions which are helping the economy safely reopen through the crisis modes that we've all been living in. So broad range responsibilities and my day-to-day is nothing like it was a year ago. >> Yeah and I could only imagine, especially when you throw that last component in, COVID, which hopefully, we'll have time to talk about just because, I think, people are so are taken to the subject now and obviously it's impacting business on so many different levels. But let's talk, first off, about IBM and your partnership with them, kind of the genesis of that, how that came about, and maybe how you're working together. How are you integrated these days with IBM? >> Well, you know, one of the things at Salesforce that are key value as an organization is is to establish trust around the transformation of organizations across the world. And when you think about brands that you can trust to drive transformations with, IBM and Salesforce really stand apart. So IBM is an incredible partner for us on the technology side, on a service delivery side, and in an innovation side for us to create new solutions to help our clients really go in this from-to state of how their businesses used to operate to how they need to operate in the future. I loved working with the IBM team. We have a lot of great values that are shared across our two organizations. But most fundamentally, those values are deeply rooted in customer success. And I think that that is one of the things that really draws me too, working with such a great partner here. >> Go into the process a little bit, if you will. So if I'm a prospective client of yours and I come to you with some cloud needs, you know, again, whether it's storage or whether it's applications or whether it's Edge, whatever it is I'm coming to you for, how do you then translate that to IBM and how does IBM come into play, where do the boundaries kind of start and stop or do they? Or is it a complete mesh? >> Yeah, well I think one of the things that's sort of unique about today's climate is people aren't just looking to solve technology problems, they're looking to solve business problems. And what we really do at Salesforce is lead with the business transformation opportunity and deeply partner with IBM on a number of fronts to really go help those opportunities become realized. The first is in the services line. IBM has great partnerships with Salesforce around the transformation about core business processes, configuration, integration services. That's one of the dimensions that we work together on. We also work together on areas of artificial intelligence and how we help businesses become smart in their operations every day to empower their workforce to really achieve more. And finally, you know that you mentioned about core technology, you know, oftentimes, the business requirements translate into great technology transformation. And that's what we do deeply with the IBM team is really outlining a blueprint and a roadmap for modernizing the technical infrastructure to help organizations move fast, increase their operational agility, and run at such scale and safely in today in the modern world that we all operate in on. So through all those facets of the lifecycle, IBM continues to be one of our leading partners, globally, to help clients, you know, not just here, in the United States, but around the world to think about how they need to maximize their transformational abilities. >> Yeah, and you touched on this at the outset of the interview. We were talking about IBM and the impact and obviously, the great association relationship that you have with them and the value in that. I'd like you to amplify on that a little bit more in terms of, specifically, what are you getting out of it you think, from a Salesforce perspective to have kind of the power and the weight and the bench, basically, that IBM provides. >> Well you think about transformation and you know, you read a lot about digital transformation online, that means so many different things to so many different businesses. Businesses, not just, like I said, here in one country, but globally, the transformational needs really need to come with incredible bench and domain expertise by industry, by geography, even by some micro-regions in those geographies given what we've been experiencing here, in the public sector in the United States with this COVID response activity we've been doing with the IBM team. And so when you talk about the deep bench, what I love about working with IBM on is, again, commanding just great industry insights and knowledge of where industries are heading and also cross-industry insights so that you can really bring great best practices from say, one industry to another. Second is that real understanding of the global nature of business today. And I don't think the one thing that's fascinating about digital, it is not a sovereign identity, today. Digital really means that you need to understand how to operate in every country, every region, every location, you know, safely. And so IBM has incredible depth in bench of experiences to help our clients truly transform those areas. Maybe another area that I really have appreciated working with IBM on is that deep technical understanding and deep technical domain of excellence maybe in the area of artificial intelligence. And our partnership is quite unique between Salesforce and IBM. Not only do we work together for external clients but inside of IBM, IBM is using Salesforce today to run a lot of your core operations. And so the partnership we work with, not only IBM as a kind of delivery excellence, but internally as a customer, is really helping IBM transform its operations from service to sales to marketing all around the world. So I think this partnership is one that is deeply rooted in working together and really, like I mentioned before, finding the right path to drive the outcomes of tomorrow. >> You know, you mentioned COVID and so we'd like to touch on that. But I assume that's a big part of your current relationship, if you will, in terms of the partnership goes. What, specifically, are you doing with IBM in that space and what have you done, and then what are you continuing to do as we go through now, the vaccination process and the variant identification processes and all these things? So maybe you can share with our viewers a little bit about the kinds of things that you have been working on together and the kind of progress that you've been making. >> Well, back a year ago, you know, when the world was really at a standstill, Salesforce created a solution called Work.com which was to engineer new technologies to help businesses kind of deal with the reality of a hard shutdown to business in the, say, private sector and then in the public sector, to really create new innovation around key solutions like contact tracing that you might have needed to track, you know, kind of outbreak and the rate of progression of the virus. And what we did with the IBM team, working with clients around the world first was work together to deploy those technologies rapidly into the hands of our customers. Through those moments of opportunity and realization, you know, working with our clients, we also started to hear of, you know, kind of about where we find ourselves today, this mass vaccination wave of where our citizens and societies are kind of on the recovery journey. And the work that we did with IBM was to start to plan out the next wave of recovery options around vaccine managements, Salesforce creating a core vaccine scheduling, distribution, and administration management services and IBM focusing on more of that credentialing and vaccination state of how someone has gone from receiving a shot in arm to now having a trusted profile of which vaccines, when did you receive them, are they still accurate and valid around those solutions. So where we're working with the IBM team most acutely on COVID now is in the vaccine credential management side through Watson Health. >> Well, can you give us an idea now, let's see if we can dig in a little deeper on some of those other things you talked about to about core technologies, you talked about, I mentioned Edge, you know, and that's people tryin' to figure out how they integrate these Edge technologies into their primary systems, now. So can you give us some examples, some specific examples of some things that you're actually collaborating on today in those areas or maybe another that comes to mind? >> Yeah, Edge computing is probably one of the other more exciting things that we're doing with the IBM team and I think you find that really working with our field service business and IBM cloud services, you know, globally speaking. On the Edge, as devices become smarter and more digital, they have a lot of signals that organizations can now tap into, not only for real-time intelligence but also fault intelligence when a device is starting to need repair or preventative maintenance around the solutions that kind of need to be administered. And the work that we're doing to really broker this connected, not just enterprise, but connected sort of experiences with IBM, super powerful here, because the IBM Edge services are now helping us get into anomaly detection. Those anomaly detections are automatically routing to workers who use the Salesforce field service capabilities, and now we can help organizations stay running safely and with continuity which is really all our customers are asking us for. So the ability for us to be creative and understand, you know, our parts of the picture together are really the things that I think are most exciting for what we're doing for clients around the world. >> Yeah, you mentioned continuity, kind of a cousin to that, I think, is security in a way because you're-- >> Absolutely. >> So what are you hearing from your customer-base these days with regard to security? You know, a lot of high profile instances certainly from bad state actors, as we well know. But what are you hearing in terms of security that you're looking at and maybe cooperating or collaborating with IBM on to make sure that those concerns are being addressed? >> Yeah, you know, I think, well, first off, security is on the top of minds for all decision-makers, executives, today. It's the number one threat that a lot of companies are really needed to respond to given what we've seen in the geo-political world that we're in. And security isn't just about securing your servers, it's also about securing every operational touchpoint that you might have with, you know, your every end-user or even every customer that's inter-operating with your services that you project as an organization. And what I love about working with the IBM team is, as we mentioned, you know, such great insights across all parts of technology infrastructure to really help understand both the threat level, how to contain that threat level, and more importantly, how to engineer with, you know, great solutions all the way into the hands of customers so they become safe and easy for all actors in your environment to really operate with. And that's where, again, you know, you think about a solution like mobile sales professionals, they're out traveling around the world on mobile devices, sometimes, their AG even brought their own personal devices into the enterprise. And so IBM is a great partner for ours just to help us understand the overall threat level of every device every moment that an employee might have within their organizational data, and really help create great solutions to help keep organizations running safely. >> Yeah, I think it's interesting you tell about people bringing their own devices on, back when, I remember that acronym, BYOB was like a huge thing, right? (chuckling) And this major problem or conundrum and now it's almost like an afterthought, you've got it solved, you've got it well taken care of. >> Well you think about, again, devices in the enterprise and how much we've been able to achieve with the BYOB becoming commonplace and norm, even today, the workman place from home kind of environment that we're in. I mean, who would have thought a year ago that most of our operations can be conducted safely from our home offices, not just our regional or corporate offices? And again, that's the kind of thing that working with IBM has been such a great value for our clients because no one could have forecasted that the contact center would've had to moved to your kitchen last year. And yet, we had to really go achieve that in this time and working with great partners like IBM, it became not just a conversation but real practice. >> By the way, I think I said BYOB. I meant BYOD, so you know where my mind's at, right? (chuckling) >> I wasn't going to correct you. >> Hey thanks, Bill, I appreciate that. It just kind of hit me. I think that that just, that was a Freudian slip, certainly. Hey Bill, thanks for the time. I certainly do appreciate and thanks for shining a light on this really good partnership between Salesforce and IBM. And we wish you continued success down the road with that, as well. >> Yeah, thanks again. And again, love being your partner and love the impact we're having together. >> Great, thank you very much. Bill Patterson joining us, the EVP work in CRM at Salesforce talking about IBM and that relationship that they're putting into practice for their client-base. John Walls reporting here, on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us with more on IBM Think. (soft music) ♪ Dah de dah ♪ ♪ Dah ♪

>>mhm Yes. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of red hat summit 2021 virtual. I'm john for a host of the cube we're here in Palo alto. Were remote with our great guest here cube alumni. I've been on many times chris wright, Senior vice president and CTO of red hat chris great to see you. Always a pleasure to have you on the screen here too. But we're not in person but thanks for coming in remote. >>Yeah, you bet. Glad to be here. >>Not only were talking about speeds and feeds, digital transformation going under the hood here we're gonna talk about red hats, expanded collaboration with boston University to help fund education and research for open source projects. So you guys have a huge relationship with boston University. Talk about this continued commitment. What's the news, what's the, what's the story? >>Well, we have a couple different things going on uh and and the relationship we have with the EU is many years in. So this itself isn't brand new. Um one of the things that's important to highlight here is we are giving something north of $550 million dollars worth of software to be you really in pursuit of running uh powering and running scaled infrastructure. That's part of the open hybrid class. Um and that's that's an important piece which we can touch on a little bit as we talk to this conversation. The other one is like I said, this isn't a new relationship with the U. And what we're doing now is really expanding the relationship. So we've we've built a great connection directly with the You were substantially expanding that. Um The original relationship we had was a $5 million relationship spread over five years now. We're talking about a $20 million Relationship spread over five years. So really a significant expansion. And of course that expansion is connected to some of the work that we plan to do together in this open hybrid cloud infrastructure and research space. So a lot of things coming together at once to really really advance the red hat ca laboratory at the U. That combined effort in bringing you know, cloud research and open source and all these things together >>and a lot of actually going on. So basically the boston area lot of universities, but I love the shirt you're wearing with his red hat innovation in the open. This is kind of one of those things you also mentioned out of this huge subscription of software grant that's going to be you just a huge number give value for for the boston University. But you also have another project that's been going on the collaborative research and education agreement called red hat collaborative orI Okay, this was in place. You mentioned that. How's that tying in because that was pre existing. Now. You've got the grant, you got your funding more and more research. Talk about how this connects into the open cloud initiative because this is kind of interesting. You're not bringing hybrid cloud kind of research and practical value in A i ops is hot. You can't you can't go anywhere these days without having great observe ability. Cloud native more and more is more complex and you've got these young students and researchers dying and get their hands on it. Take us through the connection between the CA laboratory and open open cloud. >>So the CA laboratory is a clever name that just talks about collaboration and research laboratory type research. And initially the CA laboratory focus was on the infrastructure running the cloud and some of the application workloads that can run on top of an open cloud infrastructure uh that are that's very data centric. And so this is uh an opportunity for multidisciplinary work looking at modeling for um for health care, for example for how you can improve imaging and we've had a great results in this collaboration. Um We've talked at times about the relationship with the boston Children's Hospital and the chris project not related to me, but just similar acronym that spells chris. Um and these things come together in part through connecting relationships to academia, where academia as research is increasingly built in on and around open source software. So if you think of two parallel worlds, open source software development, just the activity of building open source software, it brings so many people together and it moves so quickly that if you're not directly connected to that as an academic researcher, you risk producing academic research results that aren't relevant because it's hard for them to connect back to these large, fast moving projects, which may have invented a solution to the problem you've been focused on as an academic if you're not directly connected. So we see academia and open source coming together to build really a next generation of understanding of the scientific in depth and he's joining the >>train operations you're talking about here though, this is significant because there's dollars behind it, right? There's real money, it's not >>just the right software, >>it's it's a center, it's a joint operation. >>That's right. And so when you think about just the academic research of producing um ideas that manifest themselves as code and software projects, we want to make sure we're first connecting the software projects to open source communities in with our own engineering experience, bringing code into these open, open source projects to just advance the the feeds and speeds and speeds, the kind of functionality the state of the art of the actual project. We're also taking this to a new level with this expanded relationship and that is software today. When you, when you operate software as a cloud, a critical part of the software is the operationalization of that software. So software just sitting there on the shelf doesn't do anybody any good. Even if the shelf is an open source project, it's a tar ball waiting for you to download. If you don't ever grab it and run it, it's not doing anybody any good. And if the challenge of running it is substantial enough that it stops you from using that software, you've created a barrier to the value that's locked inside that project. The focus here is how can we take that the operations experience of running a cloud, which itself is a big complex distributed system, tie some of those experiences back into the projects that are used to build that infrastructure. So you're taking not just the output of the project, but also the understanding of what it takes to run a project and bringing that understanding and even the automation and code associated with that back into the project. So, your operational izing this open source software and you're building deeper understanding of what it means to operate things that scale, including data and data sets that you can use to build models that show how you can create the remediation and closed loop systems with AI and machine learning, you know, sort of synthesizing all the data that you generate out of a big distributed infrastructure and feed that back into the operations of that same infrastructure. So a lot going on there at the same time operationalization as as an open source initiative but also um really the understanding advancement of A I and data centric operations, so ai ops and closed the remediation. >>Yeah, I mean, devops developer and operations to operationalize it and certainly cloud Native put an emphasis on Day two operations, which leads a lot more research, a lot more uh student work on understanding the coding environment. Um so with that I got to ask um I asked you about this uh massachusetts focused or this open cloud initiative because you guys are talking about this open cloud initiative including this massachusetts. Open Cloud, what is that? What is the massachusetts? Open Cloud sounds like you're offering a kind of open person, not just bu but other um Yeah, institutions. >>That's right. So the the M o C massachusetts open cloud is itself a cross um organizational collaboration bringing together five different academic institutions in New England In massachusetts. It's bu it's Harvard mit, its Northeastern and its U. Mass. Coming together to support a common set of infrastructure which is cloud. It's a cloud that runs in a data center and then um it serves a couple of different purposes. One is research on clouds directly. So what does it mean to run a cloud? What does it look like from a research point of view to understand large scale distributed systems? And then the other is more on top. When you have a cloud you can run workloads and those workloads scaled out to do say data processing, looking at the implications of across different fields which could be natural sciences, could be medicine, could be, even political science or social science is really a multidisciplinary view of what it means to leverage a cloud and run data centric workloads on top. So two different areas that are of a focus for the M. O. C. And this becomes this sort of vehicle for collaboration between Red Hat View and the Red Hot Laboratory. >>So I have to ask only because I'm a big fan of the area and I went to one of those schools, is there like a bean pot for technical hackathons where you get all the schools matched up against each other on the mass open cloud and compete for who gets bragging rights and the text city there. >>It's a great question. Not yet. But I'll jot that down here in hell. Up on that. >>Happy to sponsor. We'll we'll do the play by play coverage, you know. Great. >>I love that. Yeah, kind of twitch tv style. The one thing that there is which is very practical is academic research grants themselves are competitive, right? People are vying for research dollars to put together proposals, Bring those proposals to um the agency that's that's that's giving out grants and winning those grants is certainly prestigious. It's important as part of her research institutes continue to fund the work that they're doing. Uh Now we've been associated uh through the work we've done to date with the U. With Yeah almost $15 million 20 papers. So there's there's a lot of work you can't quite call the play by play. It's a >>scoreboard. I mean their numbers you can put numbers on the board. I mean that's what's one of the things you can measure. But let me ask you on those grants. So you're saying this is just the bu you guys actually have data on um the impact of the relationship in terms of grants and papers and stuff like that academic work. >>That's right. That's right. And so those numbers that I'm giving you are examples of how we've worked together with the u to help their faculty generate grant dollars that then fund some of the research that's happening there together with redhead engineers and on and on the infrastructure like the massachusetts Open cloud. >>That's a good way to look at the scoreboard. It's a good point. We have to research that if you don't mind me asking on this data that you have um are all those projects contributing to open source or do they have to be? That's just generic. Is that all of you all papers around bu is part of the research. In other words, I'm trying to think if I'm in open source, has this contributed to me as an >>open source? Yeah, it's a big and complex question because there's so much research that can happen through a research institution. And those research grants tend to be governed with agreements and some of those agreements have intellectual property rights um front and center and might require things like open source software as a result, the stuff that we're working on clearly isn't that focus area of open source software and and research activities that help kind of propel our understanding forward of what does it mean to do large scale distributed systems creation and then operation. So how do you develop software that does it? How do you how do you run the software that builds these big large distributed systems? So we're focused in that area. Um some of the work that we facilitated through that focus includes integrating non open source software that might be part of um same medical imaging. So for example work we've done with the boston Children's Hospital That isn't 100 doesn't require us to be involved 100 of the open source pieces. All the infrastructure there to support it is. And so we're learning how we can build integrated pipelines for data analysis and image analysis and data sharing across different institutions uh at the open source project level. Well maybe we have a specific imaging program that is not generated from this project. And of course that's okay with >>us. You know chris you bring up a good point with all those conversations. I could see this really connecting the dots. Most computer science programs. Most engineering programs haven't really traditionally focused on it at the scale we're talking about because we look at cloud scale but now scaling with hybrid it's real engineering going on to think about the large scale. We know all the big hyper scale ear's right so it's not just I. T. Provisioning you know network connection and doing some I. T. Work. We're talking about large scale. So I have to ask you as you guys look at these relationships with academics uh academia like like bu and others um how are the students responding to this? Are you guys seeing any specific graduate level advancements? Because you're talking about operational roles that are becoming so important whether it's cyber security and as cloud needed because once more data driven you need to have all this new scale engineered up. That's >>what how >>do you look at that? >>There's two different pieces that I would highlight. One is just the data science itself. So schools still need to produce data scientists. And having data is a big part of being a data scientist and knowing what your what your goals are with that data and then experimenting with different techniques, whether it's algorithms or tools. It's a big part of being a data scientist sort of spelunking through the data. So we're helping produce data. We're looking at data science efforts around data that's used to operationalize infrastructure, which is an interesting data science endeavor by itself. The other piece is really what you highlighted, which is there's an emergence of a skill set in the industry, often referred to as SRE site reliability engineering. Um it is a engineering discipline. And if you back up a little bit and you start thinking about what are the underlying principles behind large scale distributed systems, you get to some information theory and computer science. So this isn't just something that you might think of as um some simple training of a few key tools and knowing how to interpret a dashboard. And you're good to go, this is a much more sophisticated view of what does it mean to really operate large scale infrastructure, which to date, there aren't a lot of these large scale infrastructures available to academics to research because their commercial endeavors >>and their new to me. I was talking to some young folks my son's age and daughters age and I was saying, you know, architect in a building, a skyscraper isn't trivial. You can't just do that overnight. There's a lot of engineering that goes on in that science, but you're bringing kind of operating systems theory, systems thinking to distributed computing. I mean that's combination of a interdisciplinary shift and you got, I won't say civil engineering, but like concept is there, you've got structure, you've got networks, they're changing and then you've got software so again completely new area. >>That's right and there's not a lot of even curriculum that explores this space. So one of the opportunity, there's a great program that really focuses on um that that space of site reliability engineering or operational izing software. Um And then the other piece that I'm I'm really excited about is connecting to open source communities so that as we build software, we have a way to run and operationalize that software that doesn't have to be directly tied to a commercial outlet. So products running in the cloud will have a commercial S. L. A. And commercial agreements between the user and the producer of that service. How do you do that in open source context? How do you leverage a community, bring that community software to a community run service, learn through the running of that service. How to best build architect the service itself and then operationalized with the tooling and automation that service? How do you, how do you bring that into the open source community? And that's something that we've been referring to as the operate first initiative. How do you get the operationalization of software? Really thought of as a primary focal point in the software project where you normally think about the internals of software, the features, the capabilities of functionality, less about the operationalization. So important shift at the open source project level, which is something that I think will really be interesting and we'll see a lot of reaping a lot of rewards. Just an open source communities directly. >>Yeah, speed and durability. Certainly having that reliability is great. You know, I love talking with you guys at red hat because, you know, software, you know, open source and you know, operating systems because as it comes together in this modern era, what a great, great fit, great work you're doing with Boston University's and the mass open cloud initiative. Congratulations on that. I got I got to ask you about this Red Hat Graduate Fellows program you have because this kind of speaks to what you guys are doing, you have this kind of this redhead graduate fellows network and the work that's being done. Does that translate into red hat at all? From an engineering standpoint? How does that, how does that work together? >>Basically, what we do is we support um PhD students, we support post docs. So there's a real direct support to the, you know, that is the Red Jack Graduate Fellow program on our focus there is connecting those um uh academics, the faculty members and the students to our engineers to work together on key research initiatives that we think will help drive open source software agendas forward really broad can be in all different areas from security to virtualization too, the operating systems to cloud distributed systems, uh and one of the things that we've discovered is it creates a great relationship with the university and we find students that will be excited to leave university and come into the the industry workforce and work at Red hat. So there is a direct talent relationship between the work that we do at bu and the talent that we can bring into red hat, which is awesome. Uh We know these people we've worked with well with them, but also we're kind of expanding understanding of open source across, you know, more and more of academia, which I think is really valuable and important for red hat. We just go out to the the industry at large, um, and helping bring a set of skills to the industry that whether they're coming, whether these are students that come into red hat or go elsewhere into the industry, these are important skills to have in the industry. So we look at the, how do you work in open source communities? How to operationalize software at scale? These are important things. They didn't >>expand, expand the territory if you will in terms of systems thinking. We just talked about great collaboration. You guys do a great job chris great to have you on a quick final word from you on this year at red hat summer. I know it's virtual again, which we could be in person, but we're starting to come out of the covid kind of post covid right around the corner. Um, what's the update? How would you describe the current state of red hat? Obviously you guys still got that, that vibe. You still pumping strong a lot going on. What's the current? What's the current, uh, bumper sticker? What's the vibe? >>Well, in many ways, because we're so large and distributed. Um, the last year has been, uh, can't say business as usual because it's been an impact on everybody, but it hasn't required us to fundamentally change. And as we work across open source communities, there's been a lot of continuity that's come through a workforce that's gone completely distributed. People are anxious to get to the next phase, whatever back to normal means. Uh, and people at Red Hat are no different. So we're looking forward to what it can mean to spend time with colleagues in offices, were looking forward to what it means to spend time together with our friends and families and travel and all those things. But from a, from a business point of view, Red Hat's focus on the open hybrid cloud and that distributed view of how we work with open source communities. That's something that's, it's only continued to grow and pick up over the course of the last year. So it's clearly an important area for the industry and we've been busier than ever the last year. So, uh, interesting, interesting times for everybody. >>Well, it's great to see and I love how the culture maintains its its relevance, its coolness intersection between software, Open Source and systems. Great, Great working congratulations chris. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>All right. I'm John for here with the Cube for Red Hat Summit 2021. Thanks for watching. Mhm.

>>from around the globe, >>it's the cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by >>IBM. Welcome back here on the cube, jOHn wall is your host with you as we continue our IBM think initiative. Been talking a lot about IBM s assistance in terms of what it's doing for its client base. We're gonna talk about partnerships today a little bit with Bill Patterson who is the VP and general manager of Crm applications at Salesforce, who has a really good partnership in great practice right now with IBM and Bill, thanks for the time to you looking forward to spending some time with you hear, >>thank you Jon. Thanks for having me today. >>You bet. Let's just jump right in first off, let's share with the viewers about your core responsibilities that sales for us. We're talking about Crm what your engagement is there, but if you would just kind of give us an idea of the kind of things that you're handling on a day to day basis, >>Well I am responsible for our crm applications here at Salesforce, which are our sales cloud technologies to help organizations get back to growth. Our service cloud technologies which are really helping organizations to take care of their customers through all moments of the digital lifecycle are small business solutions. So to help growing organizations thrive uh and our work dot common vaccine management solutions which are helping economies safely reopen through the crisis modes that we've all been living in. So broad range of responsibilities in my day to day is nothing like it was a year ago. >>I could only imagine, especially when you throw that last component in Covid, which hopefully will have some time to talk about just because they people are so are taken to the subject now and obviously it's impacting business on so many different levels. But let's talk first off about IBM and your partnership with them kind of the genesis of that, how that came about and maybe how you're working together, how are you integrated these days with IBM? >>Well you know one of the things that Salesforce that are key value as an organization is is to establish trust around the transformation of organizations across the world and when you think about brands that you can trust to drive transformation with IBM and Salesforce really stand apart. Uh so IBM is an incredible partner for us, on the technology side, on a service delivery side and an innovation side for us to create new solutions to help our clients really go in this from two state of how their businesses used to operate to how they need to operate in the future. Um I love working with the IBM team, we have a lot of great values that are shared across our two organizations, but most fundamentally those values are deeply rooted in customer success. And I think that that is one of the things that really draws me to working with such a great partner here. >>Yeah. Go into the process a little bit if you will. So if I'm a prospective client of yours and I come to you with some cloud needs, you know, again, whether it's uh, you know, storage or whether it's applications or whether it's edge, whatever it is, you know, I'm coming to you for um how do you then translate that to IBM and how does IBM come into play? Where does where do the boundaries kind of start and stop or do they? Is it a complete mesh? >>Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that's sort of unique about today's climate is people aren't just looking to solve technology problems. They're looking to solve business problems and what we really do, you know, at Salesforce's lead with the business transformation opportunity uh, and deeply partnered with IBM on a number of fronts to really go help those opportunities become realized. The first is in the services line. IBM has great partnerships with Salesforce around the transformation about core business processes, configuration integration services. That's one of the dimensions that we work together on. We also worked together on the areas of artificial intelligence and how we help businesses become smart in their operations every day to empower their workforce to really achieve more. And finally, you know that you mentioned about core technology oftentimes the business requirements translate into great technology transformation and that's what we do deeply with the IBM team is really outlined a blueprint and a road map for modernizing the technical infrastructure to help organizations move fast, increase their operational agility and run at such scale and safely today in the modern world that we all operate in on so through all those facets of the life cycle, IBM continues to be one of our leading partners globally to help clients, you know, not just here in the United States but around the world think about how they need to maximize their transformational abilities. >>And you touched on this at the outset of the interview, we were talking about IBM and the impact and and obviously the great association relationship that you have with them and the value in that I'd like you to amplify on that a little bit more in terms of specifically what are you getting out of it you think from a sales force perspective to have kind of the power and the weight and the bench basically that IBM provides. >>Yeah, well you think about transformation and you know, you read a lot about digital transformation online, that means so many different things to so many different businesses, businesses not just like I said here in one country, but globally the transformational needs, you really need to come with incredible bench and domain expertise by industry, by geography. Even by, you know, some micro regions in those geography has given what we've been experiencing here in the public sector in the United States with the scope of response activity we're doing with the IBM team. And so when you talk about the deep bench, what I love about working with IBM on is again commanding just great industry insights and knowledge of where industries are heading uh and also cross industry insights so that you can really bring great best practices from say one industry to another Um second is that real understanding of the global nature of business today. And I don't think the one thing that's really fasting about digital, it is not a sovereign identity today, a digital really means that you need to understand how to operate in every country, every region, every location uh you know, safely and so IBM has incredible depth and bench of experiences to help our clients truly transform those areas. Maybe another area that I really have appreciated working with IBM on is that deep technical understanding and deep technical domain of excellence, you know, maybe in the area of artificial intelligence and our partnership is quite unique between Salesforce and IBM, not only do we work together for external clients, but inside of IBM, IBM is using Salesforce today to run a lot of your core operations. And so the partnership we work with not only IBM as a kind of delivery excellence, but internally as a customer is really helping IBM transform its operations from service to sales to marketing all around the world. So I think this partnership is one that is deeply rooted in in working together and really like I mentioned before, finding the right path to drive the outcomes >>of tomorrow, you know, you mentioned Covid, um and so I would like to touch on that, but I assume that's you know, a big part of of your current relationship, if you will in service of the partnership goes, what specifically are you doing with IBM in that space of what have you done? And then what are you continuing to do as we go through now, the vaccination process and the variant identification processes and all these things. So maybe you can share with our viewers a little bit about the kinds of things that you have been working on together and the kind of progress that you've been making. >>Yeah, well back, you know, a year ago, uh you know when the world was really at a standstill, uh sales first created a solution called work dot com, which was to engineer new technologies to help businesses kind of deal with the reality of a hard shutdown to business in the say prime um private sector and in the public sector to really create new innovation around key solutions like contact tracing that you might have needed to track, you know, kind of outbreak and uh you know, the rate of progression of the virus. And what we did with the IBM team, working with uh clients around the world, first was work together to deploy those technologies rapidly into the hands of our customers through those moments of opportunity and realization. You know, working with our clients, we also started here, you know, kind of about, you know, where we find ourselves today. This mass vaccination wave of where our citizens and societies are kind of on the recovery journey. And the work that we did with IBM was to start to plan out the next wave of recovery options around vaccine management sales force, creating the core vaccine scheduling, distribution in administration management services in IBM focusing on more of that credentialing and vaccination state of how someone has gone from receiving a shot and arm to now having a trusted profile of which vaccines. When did you receive them? Are they still accurate, valid? Uh, around those solutions. So where we're working with the IBM tape most acutely on covid now is in the vaccine credential management side through Watson health. >>Mm Well, can you give us an idea now? Let's if we can dig in a little deeper on some other things you talk about? Talk about core technologies, we talked about, I mentioned Edge you know, that's when people are trying to figure out how to integrate, you know, these edge technologies into their, into their primary systems now. So, um can you give us some examples, some specific examples of some things that you're actually collaborating on today in those areas or maybe another that comes to mind? >>Yeah. Edge computing is probably one of the other more exciting things that we're doing with the IBM team. And I think you find that really working with our field service business and IBM cloud services, you know, globally speaking on the edge, you know, as devices become smarter and more digital. Um, they have a lot of signals that organizations can now tap into not only for real time intelligence, but also fault intelligence. When a device actually is starting to need repair or preventative maintenance around the solutions that kind of need to be administered and the work that we're doing to really broker this connected, not just enterprise, but connected set of experiences, but by IBM super powerful here because the IBM edge services are now helping us get into anomaly detection, those anomaly detection czar automatically routing to workers who use the sales force field service capabilities. And now we can help organizations stay running uh, you know, safely and and with continuity, which is really all our customers are asking us for. So the ability for us to be creative and understand our parts of the picture together are really the things that I think are most exciting um for what we're doing for clients around >>the world. Now, you mentioned continuity, kind of a cousin of that and a security right, in a way, because, you know, um so what are you hearing from your your customer base these days with regard to security? You know, a lot of very high profile instances, certainly from bad state actors, as we will know. But what are you hearing in terms of security that you're looking at and maybe cooperating and collaborating with IBM on to make sure that those concerns are being addressed? >>Yeah. You know, I think, well, first off security is on the top of mines, you know, for all decision makers, executives today, it's the number one threat that a lot of companies are really needing to respond to, given what we've seen, uh you know, in the geopolitical world that we're in. Um and security isn't just about securing your servers, it's also about securing every operational touch point that you might have with, you know, your um uh every end user or even every customer that's inter operating with your services that you project as an organization. And what I love about working with the IBM team as we mentioned, you know, just such great insights across all parts of technology infrastructure to really help understand both the threat level, uh how to contain that threat level, and more importantly how to engineer, you know, with great solutions all the way into the hands of customers so that becomes safe and easy for all actors in your environment to really operate with. Um And that's where, you know, again, you think about a solution like mobile sales professionals, you know, they're out traveling around the world on mobile devices, sometimes they're even brought their own personal devices into the enterprise. And so IBM is a great partner for ours just to help us understand the overall threat level of every device, every moment that an employee might have within their organizational data and really helped create great solutions to keep organizations running >>safely. Yeah, I think it's uh interesting you talk about people bringing their own devices on back when I remember that from B y O B was like a huge thing, right? And this major problem or a conundrum and now it's, it's almost like an afterthought right? You got it solved, we got it well, taken care of, >>oh, you think about again, devices in the enterprise and how much we've been able to achieve with the will be becoming commonplace in norm even today, the working place from home kind of environment that we're in, I mean, who would have thought a year ago that most of our operations conducted safely from her home office is not just our regional and corporate offices. And again, that's the kind of thing that working with IBM has been such a great value for our clients because you know, no one could have forecasted that the context center would have had to move to your kitchen last year. Uh and yet, you know, we had to really go achieve that in this time and working great partners like IBM, it became not just a conversation but real practice. >>Right by the way, I think I said, B Y O. B. I met B Y O. D. And so you know where my mind's at? Uh >>I wasn't gonna correct you. I appreciate that. It's >>Just kind of hit me. I think that just that was a 40 and slip. Certainly. >>Hey Bill, thanks for >>the time. I certainly do appreciate it. Thanks for shining light on this really good partnership between Salesforce and IBM. And we wish you continued success down the road with that as well. >>Yeah. Thanks again and again. Love being your partner and love the impact we're having together. >>Great! Thank you very much. Bill Patterson joining us, the VP working Crm at Salesforce, talking about IBM and that relationship that they're putting into practice for their client base. John Wall's reporting here on the cube. Thanks for joining us with more on IBM thing. Yeah.

>> Woman: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios to have a Cube conversation with a real leader in the industry he's been publishing for a long, long time. I've been following him in social media. First time I've ever get the met in person and kind of a virtual COVID 20, 20 way. And we're excited to welcome into the studio. Bob Evans. He's a founder and principal analyst, the Cloud Wars Media coming to us. Bob where are you coming to us from today? >> In Pittsburgh today. Jeff. Good to see you. >> Awesome. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. There's a lot of Fricks in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania cause Henry Clay was there many moons ago so that's a good town. So welcome. >> Thank you, Jeff. Thanks. Great to be here. And I look forward to our conversation. >> Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So I know you attended today, the Citrix Cloud Summit you know, we've covered Citrix energy in the past this year, they decided to go we'll obviously virtual like everybody did but they, you know, they did something a little creative I think as, and they broke it into pieces, which, which I think is the way of the future. There's no reason to necessarily aggregate all of your news, all of your customer stuff, all your customer appreciation, the party the partners, all for three days in Vegas. Cause that's the only time you could get the Science Convention Center. So today was the Cloud Summit all day long. First off, just, you know, your general impressions of the event, >> Jeff, you know, I just thought that the guys had hit a really good note about what's going on in the outside world. You know, sometimes I think it's a little awkward when tech companies come in and the first thing they want to talk about is themselves, which I guess in some ways fine but I think the Citrix guys did a really good job at coming outside in here's what's going on in the outside world. Here's how we as a technology player trying to adapt to that and deliver the maximum value to our customers in this time of unprecedented change. So I thought they really nailed that with cloud and some of the other big topics that they laid out >> Great. And you've been covering cloud for a long time and, and you know, COVID is, we're still in it. There's a lot of really bad things that are happening. There's hundreds of thousands of people that are dying and a lot of businesses are getting crushed especially hospitality, travel you know, anything that relies on an aggregation of people. Conversely though we're, we're fortunate to be in the IT industry and in the information industry. And for a lot of industries, it's actually been kind of an accelerant. And one of the main accelerants is this, you know kind of digital transformation and new way to work. And some of these things that were initiatives in play but on March 15th, approximately it was go, right? It was Light switch no more planning, no more talking, it's here now. Ready, set, go. And it's in, you know, Citrix is in a pretty good position in terms of the products that they offer, the services that they offer, the customer base that they have to take advantage of that opportunity and, and you know, go to this, we've all seen the social media memes right? Who's driving your digital transformation the CEO, the CIO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer to the question is. They're pretty well positioned and it seems like, you know, they're doing a good job kind of doubling down on the opportunity. >> Jeff. Yeah. And I'd sure echo your, your initial point there about the nightmare that everybody's experienced over the last six or seven months. There's, there's no way around that yet. It has forced in these categories like, you know, that we've all heard hundreds of thousand time digital transformation to the point where the term almost becomes a cliche but in fact right? You know, it has become something that's really you know, one of the driving forces, touching everybody in the planet, right? There's, and I think digital transformation. Isn't so much about the technology, of course but it's because, you know, there's a couple billion people around the world who want to live digitally enhanced digitally driven lifestyles. And the pandemic only accelerated that as you said. So it triggered things you know, in our personal lives and our new set of requirements and expectations sort of rippled up to the B2C companies and from them back up to the B2B companies So every company on earth, every industry has had to do this. And like you said, if they were, deluding themselves maybe telling themselves these different companies that yeah, we're going fast, we're aggressive. Well, when this thing hit earlier this year as you said, they just had to really slam their foot down. I think that David Henshall from Citrix said that they had some companies that had, they were compressing three years into five months or he said in some cases even weeks. So it's really been extraordinary. And cloud has been the vehicle for these companies to get over into their digital future. >> Right. And let's talk about that for a minute because you know, Moore's law is my favorite law that nobody knows which was, you know, we tend to underestimate, excuse me we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term of specific technology and underestimate the longterm impact. You know, Gardener kind of uses a similar thing with the hype cycle. And then you know, the thing goes at the end, you know, had COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago you know, the ease in which the information workers were able to basically just not show up and turn on their computer at home and have access to most of their tools and most of the security and most of their applications that wasn't even possible. So it's a really interesting, you know, just validation on the enabler that we are actually able to not go to work on Tuesday the 16th or whatever the day was. And for the most part, you know, get most of our work done. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I've thought about it a lot over the last several months. Remember the big consultant companies used to try to do these measures of technology and they'd always come out and say, well, we've done all these studies. And despite the billions of dollars of investment we can't show that IT has actually boosted productivity or, you know, delivered an ROI that customers should be happy with. I was always puzzled by some of the things that went into those. But I would say that today over these last six or seven months to your point, we have seen extraordinary validation of these investments in technology broadly. But specifically I think some of these things that are happening with the cloud, you know, as you've said how fast some companies have been able to do this and then not remarkable thing, Jeff right. About human nature. And we hear a lot about in, in when companies change that relative to changing human behavior changing technology is somewhat easy but you try to change human behavior and it's wicked. Well, we had this highly motivating force behind it, of the pandemic. So you had a desire on the part of people to change. And as you pointed out, there's also this corresponding thing of, you know, the technology was here. It was right. You've got a fast number of companies delivering some extraordinary solutions. And, you know, I thought it was interesting. I think it was a Kirsten Kliphouse from Google cloud. One of Citrix's partners who said that we're two best of breed companies, Citrix and Google cloud. So I thought that, that coming from Google you know, that is very high praise. So again, I think the guys at Citrix are sort of coming into this at the right time with the right set of outside in-approaches and having that flexibility to say that we're moving into territory nobody's ever been both been in before. So we better be able to move as fast as possible. >> Right. Right. And, and just to keep going down the quote line, you know once everyone is taken care of and you, you deal with the health and safety of your people which is a number one, right? The other thing is the great Winston Churchill quote which has never let a good crisis go to waste. And I think you know, David talked about in that, in his keynote that this is an opportunity, He said to challenge assumptions, challenge the models of the past. So, you know get beyond the technology discussion and use this really as a catalyst to rethink the way that you do things. And, you know, I think it's a really interesting moment because there is no model right? There is no, there is no formula for how do you reopen, there was no playbook for how do you shut down? You know, it was, everybody's figuring it out. And you've got kind of all these concurrent processes happening at the same time as everyone tries to figure it out and come to solutions. But clearly, you know, the path to, to leverage as much as you can, is the cloud and the flexibility of the cloud and, you know the ability to, to expand, add more applications. And so, you know, Citrix again, right place, right time right. Solution, but also you know, taking an aggressive tact to take advantage of this opportunity, both in taking care of their customers, but really it's a real great opportunity for them to change a little bit. >> It is. And Jeff, you know, I think if I could just piggyback on you know, your, your guy there Winston Churchill, one of his other quotes, I love it too. And he said, if find yourself crawling through hell, keep going. And I think so many companies have really had to do that now. It's, it's not ideal. It's not maybe the way they plan it but this is the reality we're facing here in 2020 and a couple of things right? I think it requires a new type of leadership within the customer companies right? What, how the CEO gets engaged in saying, I, I'm not going to relegate this to the CIO for this to happen and something else to the CMO. They've got to be front and center on this because people are pretty smart. And then the heightened sensitivity that everybody in every business has around the world today if you think your CEO is just paying lip service to this stuff about digital transformation and all these changes that everybody's going to make, the people aren't going to buy into it. So you've got the leadership thing happening on the one side and into that it's not a vacuum, but into that void or that opportunity of this unprecedented space that you mentioned come the smart, capable forward-looking technology companies that are less concerned with the stuff that they've dragged along with them for years or decade or more. But instead of trying to say, what is the new stuff that people are going to be desperately in need of and how can I help these customers do things that they never did before? It's going to require me as a tech company to do stuff that I've never done before. So I, I've just been really inspired by seeing a lot of the tech companies doing what they are helping their customers to do which is take a product development cycle, look at all the new stuff that came out around COVID and back to work, workspaces. And so on what Citrix, you know others are doing like this, the product development cycles Jeff, you study this stuff closely. It's, it's almost unimaginable. If you had said that somebody within three months within two months, we're going to have a new suite of product available we would have said it just, it's not possible the nice idea but it can't work, but that's happening now, right? >> Yeah. Isn't it interesting that had you asked them on March 10th, they would have told you it's not possible. And by March 20th, they were doing it. >> Yeah. >> At scale, huge companies. And to your point, I think that the good news is they had kind of their own companies to eat their own dog food and get their own employees you know, working from home and then, you know, bake that into the way that they had their go to market. But let's talk a little bit more specifically about work from home or work from anywhere or the new way to work. And it's funny cause that's been bantered about for, for way too long, but now, now it's here. And most indications are that for many people, many companies are saying you're not going to go back for a while. And even when you do go back it's going to be a lot different. So, you know, the new way to work is really important. And there's so much that goes into that. And one of the big pieces that I'm encouraged to hear is how do you measure work? And, you know, there's a great line I heard where, you know work is an output. It's not a place to go. And, you know, I had Martin Michaelson early on in this thing, and he had the great line, you know it's so easy to fake it at work, you know, just look busy and walk around and go to all the meetings where with a work from home or work from anywhere. What the leadership needs to do is, is a couple of things. One, is measure output right? Not activity. And you know, it's great. People can have dinner with their family or go see the kid's baseball game. Or I guess they don't have a baseball games right now but, you know, measure output, not activity which is, doesn't seem to be that revolutionary. But I think it kind of is. And, and then the other thing is really be an enabler and be a, an unblocker for people in terms of a leadership role right? Get out, help get stuff out of the way. And, but unfortunately, the counter is, you know how many apps does a normal person have to interact with every day? And how many notifications do those apps fire off every day between Slack and Asana and Salesforce and, and texts and tweets and everything else. You know, I think there's a real opportunity to take a whole nother level of productivity improvement by removing these, these silly distractions automating, you know, as much of the crap away as we can to enable people to use their brains and have some quiet time and think about things and deliver much better value than this constant reaction to nonstop notifications. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I loved your point there about the difference between people's outlook on March 10th versus on March 20th. And I believe that, you know, all limitations are self-imposed, right? We tend to form constructs around how we think and allow those then to shape and often restrict or confine our behavior. And here's an example of the CEO of Novartis Pharmaceutical Company. He said, we have been brought up in the pharmaceutical industry to believe that it is immutable law of physics that it's going to take 12 and a half years and two and a half billion dollars to get a new drug approved. And he said in the past with the technology and the processes and the capabilities that that was true it is not true today yet too often, the pharmaceutical industries behave like those external limitations are put in there. So flip that over to one of the customers that, that was at the Citrix Cloud Summit today Jim Noga, who's the CIO at Mass General Brigham. I thought it was remarkable what he said when you asked about how are things going with this work from home? Well, Jim Noga the CIO there said that we had been averaging before COVID 9,000 virtual visits a month. And he said since then that number has gone up to a quarter of a million virtual visits a month or it's 8,000 a day. So they're doing an a day what they used to do in a month. Like, you said it, you tell them that on March 10th, they're not going to believe it but March 20th, it started to become reality. So I think for the customers, they're going to be more drawn to companies that are willing to say, I see your need. I see how fast you want to move. I see where you need to go and do things you never did before. I'm willing to lock elbows with you, and go in on that. And the tech number is that sort of sit back and say, ah well, I'd like to help you there, but that's not what I do. They're going to get destroyed. They're going to get blown out. And I think over the next year or two, we're going to see this massive forcing function in the tech industry. That's going to separate the companies that are able to move at the pace of market and keep up with their customers versus those that are trapped by their past or by their legacy. And it is, going to be a fascinating talk. >> So I throw on a follow up to make sure I understand that number. Those are patient visits per unit time. >> Yeah. At Mass Brigham. So he said 9,000 virtual visits a month is what they're averaging before COVID. He said, now we're up to 250,000 virtual visits per month. >> Wow. >> So it's 8,000 a day. >> Wow. I mean the thing that highlights to me, Bob, and the fact that we're doing this right now, and none of us had to get on an airplane is, you know, I think when people think back or sit back and look at what does this enable? right? What does digital enable? Instead of saying instead of focusing what we can't do, like we can't go out and get a cup of coffee after this is over and we can't and that would be great and we'd have a good time but conversely, there's so many new things that you can do right? And you can reach so many more people than you could physically. And, and for like, you know, events like the one today. And, you know, we cover events all the time. So many more people can attend if they don't have the expense, of flying to Vegas and they don't have to leave the shop or, you know, whatever the limitations are. And we're seeing massive increases in registrants for virtual events, massive increase in new registrants. Who've never attended the, the events before. So I think he really brings up a good point, which is, you know, focus on what you can do and which is a whole new opportunity a whole new space, if you will, as opposed to continuing to whine about the things that we can't do because we can't do anything about those anyway >> No, and you know, that old line of a wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first (laughs) you know, one of the other guests that that was on the Cloud Summit today Jeff, I don't know if you got to see 'em, but Steve Shute from SAP who heads up their entire 40,000 person customer success organization he said this about Citrix. "Citrix workspace is the foundation to provide secure cloud based access for this new generation of remote workers." So you get companies like SAP, and, you know, you want to talk about somebody that has earned its way into the, you know the biggest companies in the world and how they go along. You know, it's pretty powerful. They end up, your point Jeff, about how things have changed, focus on what we can do. The former CEO of SAP, Bill McDermott. He recently said, we think of phones as, you know, devices that help us be more productive. We think of computers as devices that help us be more productive. He said, now the world's going to start thinking of the office or the headquarters. It's a productivity tool. That's all it is. It's not the place that measures Hey, he was only at work, four days today. So, you know, he didn't really contribute. It's going to be a productivity tool. So we're going to look at a lot of concepts and just flip them upside down what they meant in February. Isn't going to to mean that much after this incredible change that we've all been through. >> Right. Right. Another big theme I wanted to touch base with you on it was very evident at the at the show today was multicloud right and hybrid cloud. And, you know, I used to work for Oracle in, in the day. And you know Amazon really changed the game in, in public cloud. The greatest line, one of Jeff's best lines is you know, we had seven year headstart. Nobody even was paying attention to the small book seller in Seattle and they completely changed enterprise technology. But what came across today pretty clearly right? As horses for courses, and really focusing at the application first right? The workload first and where that thing runs and how that thing runs, can be any place in that in a large organization you know, this is pick an airline or, or a big bank right? They're going to have stuff running at Oracle. They're going to have stuff running at AWS. They're going to have stuff running on Google. They're going to to have stuff running in Azure. They're going to have stuff running in their data center. IBM cloud, Ali Baba. I mean there's restrictions for location and, and data sovereigncy and all these things that are driving it. And really, you know, kind of drives this concept where the concept of cloud is kind of simple but the actual execution day to day at the enterprise level and managing and keeping track of this stuff, it is definitely a multicloud hybrid cloud. Pick your, pick your, your adjective but it's definitely not a single cloud world. That's for sure. >> Yeah. Yeah. And Jeff, you know, the Citrix customer that I mentioned earlier, Jim Noga is that the CIO at mass General Brigham, one of the other points he made about this was he said he's been very pleased about some of the contributions that cloud has made in, in, in his hospital organizations, you know transformation, what they've been able today and all the new things that they're capable of doing now that they were not people poor. But he said, you know, cloud is a tool. He said, it's not Nirvana. It's not a place for everything. He said, we have some on-premises systems. He said, they're more valuable now than they were a couple of years ago. And then we've got edge devices and we have something else over here. He said, so I think his point was it's important to put the proper value on cloud for all the things it can do for a specific organization, but not the thing that it's a panacea for everything though, big fan, but also a realist about it. >> Great. >> And so from that to the hybrid stuff and multicloud and I know all the big tech vendors would love it and say Oh no, it's not a multicloud, but just be my cloud. Just, just use my stuff. Everything will be easy, but that's not true. So I think Citrix position itself really well big emphasis on security, big emphasis on the experience that employees need to have. It isn't just sort of like a road war you loose five or seven years ago, as long as he, or she can connect through email and, you know, sending a sales data back and forth, they're all set. Now. It's very different. You've got people sitting in a wildly different environments for, you know, six, eight, 10 hours a day and chunk of an hour or two or three here or there. But that, that seamless experience always dependable, always reliable is just, you know, it can't be compromised. And I just thought you have one you know, high level thought about what happened. It was impressive for me to see that Citrix certainly a fine company put it. It's not one of the biggest tech companies in the world but look at the companies we have, the Microsoft, SAP talking about Google Cloud, AWS, you know, up and down the line. So I just thought it was really impressive how they showed their might as sort of a part of a network effect that is undeniable right now. >> Right. Right. And I think it's driven, you know, we hear over and over right? I mean, co-opertition is a very Silicon Valley thing. And ultimately it's about customer choice and the customer's going to choose you know, kind of by workload, even if you will or by budget as to what they're going to do where so you have to be able to operate in that world or you're going to be you're going to get, you're going to get left out unless you're just super dominant and it's a single application and they built it on you and that's it. But that's not realistic. I want to shift gears a little bit Bob, since I'm so happy to be talking to you on another topic, that's, that's a big mega trend and we're slowly seeing more and more applications. That's machine learning and artificial intelligence and you know, and, and the generic conversations about these remind me of the old big data conversations. It's like okay. So what you know, who cares? It doesn't really matter until you apply it. And with all these new applications and even just around the work from home that we discussed earlier, you know, there's so many opportunities to apply machine learning and AI, to very specific functions and tasks to, again, help people prioritize what they're going to do help people not have to deal with the crap that they shouldn't have to do. And really, you know at a whole another level of, of productivity really, based on a smarter way to help them figure out what am I going to do in my next, my next marginal minute? You know, cause ultimately that's the decision that people make when they're sitting down getting work, done it, how do they do the best work? And I think the AI and machine learning opportunities are gargantuan. >> Jeff. The point you made a few minutes ago about, you know, we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term and underestimate it, what it'll be overtime well, we've been doing that with AI for the last 40 years but this is going to be sort of the golden age of it. And one of the reasons why I have been so bullish on cloud is it presents like the perfect delivery system for it. This is we see in medicine, there's sometimes breakthroughs at the laboratory level where they've got the new breakthrough medication but they don't have the bullet. They don't have the delivery system to get it in there, cloud's going to be an accelerator for that. And it gives the tech companies, which and this is going to be very good for customers, every big tech company. Now as a data company, every company says, it's an analytics. Everybody says I'm into AI. Every company says I'm into ML. And in a way that's real good for customers cause the competitive level is going to soar. It's going to bring more choice. As you said, the more customers more types of solutions, more sorts of innovation. And it's also going to be incumbent on those tech vendors. You've got to make it as easy as possible, as fast as possible for these customers to get the benefit of it. I think it was Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google cloud said, Hey, you know, if, if a shoe company or a retailer or a bank had fantastic expertise in data science, they could go out and hire 200 data scientists do this all themselves. He said, but that's not what they do. And they don't want to do that. >> Right. >> So he said, come to the companies who can do it. And I think that we will see changes in how business works driven by ML and AI, unlike anything that we've ever seen. >> Yeah. >> And that's going to happen over the next 12, 18 months. >> Yeah. Baked into everything. Well, Bob, I really am excited that we finally got to catch up in, in person COVID style. Like I said, I've been following you for a long time. So I just gave you the last word before we sign off. You know, you've been in this business for a long time. You've seen lots and lots of waves. You know, this is just another wave with this, with this, you know, gasoline thrown on the fire with, with COVID in terms of the rate of change. And the, you know there's no more talking, the time to move is now, share kind of your perspective as to kind of where we are. And, you know, we're, we're not that far from flipping the calendar to 2021, which is a good thing you know, as you, as you look forward a little bit you know, what's in your mind, what's getting you excited. What's getting you up in the morning. >> Yeah. Jeff, I guess it comes down to this thing of, we, I think here late in 2020, everybody's got a reason to be pretty proud of what we have done, not only in the last six months but over the last several years, if you look at the improvements that have been made in health care and making it available to more people, in education the things that teenagers or young teenagers or even pre-teenagers can do now to learn and explore the world and communicate with people from all over the globe, there's a lot of great things going on, but I think we're going to look back on this point and say, this was, this was a pivot point here in mid and late 2020, when we stopped letting in some ways, as you described it earlier worrying so much about the things we can't do. And instead put more time into what we can do, what breakthroughs can we make. And I think these things we've talked about with AI and ML are going to be a big part of that, the computer industry or the tech industry, maturing and understanding they're not in charge. It's the customers who are in charge here. And the tech companies have to reorient themselves and reimagine themselves to meet the demands of this new fast changing world. And so I think those are some of the mega trends and more and more Jeff, I think these tech companies are going to say that the customers are demanding that the tech companies give them the gift of speed, give them the gift of engaging with customers in new ways, give them the gift of seeing the world as other people see it rather than just through the narrow lens of, you know sometimes the tech bubble that can percolate somewhere out sometimes out in the Palo Alto area. So I, I'm incredibly optimistic about what the future is going to bring. >> Well, Thank you. Thanks for Bob for sharing your insight. You can follow Bob on Twitter. He's got podcasts, he's very prolific writer and again, really, really a great to meet you in person. And thanks for sharing your thoughts >> Jeff, thanks so much. You guys do a fantastic job and it's been a pleasure to be with you. >> Thank you. Allright. He's Bob Evans. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCube from our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to theCUBE, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about a very important topic around de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. This is critical, especially in the era of COVID. And with me, to really explore this issue is Dr. Rico, who's the vice president office of the CTO at INFINIDAT Doc. Good to see you. >> Good to see you again, Dave. >> And Ken Steinhardt, is also here as a field CTO at INFINIDAT and I got to tell the audience, Doc, you're also the chairman of the Mass Motorcycles Association. You're a very cool guy. You're a pilot, you're a firearms instructor, all about safety, and Ken and Doc you're both musicians, right? Doc, I think he played the drums, and Ken, I know when we first met, you're a music guy, so wow. Surrounded by talent so, thank you so much for coming on. >> Glad to be here. Great to see you. >> For the other thing too is that you guys are long time storage industry experts. I've known you both for many, many years. INFINIDAT deep engineering expertise of course, everybody knows about Moshay, he created the most successful product in the history of the storage industry. And we're going to talk about the importance of data, especially in this era of COVID, and how mission criticality has really become more and more important. So, I want to start Doc with you and this notion of business continuity. How are you thinking about, and INFINIDAT thinking about business continuity in this isolation era? >> Well, that's a really great question Dave, because it has changed quite a bit. And as you said, we've known each other a long time, all the way back to when I still had hair, that was how long ago it was. But, business continuity is something that every business constantly looks at throughout their evolution. And it's one of these things where certain applications are typically more mission critical than others. And lately, what we've seen is this genre of a lights out data center that has become absolutely critical operating a business today. People can't just be on site anymore. People need to be working remotely, and that includes data center personnel and in many respects. So, this whole concept of business continuity now encompasses not only the operation equipment that's on premises, or sometimes even off premises, but it also encompasses applications that people need access to that they may not have thought of mission critical before, because working from home was a convenience or working remotely was a convenience, not a requirement for that business. >> You, Ken, I know you talked to a lot of CIOs. I was sitting at a CIO round table with my friends down at ETR recently, and one of the CIO said, when COVID hit, we realized that our business quote unquote business continuity plans were just way too narrowly focused on DR. What do you see from the IT community? >> It's funny because I literally was on a CIO round table with the West Coast this morning. And there were a couple of interesting comments that really stuck out to me from some of the people there. One was commenting of just reaffirming, what Doc said, how much people are working from home now. They said, traditionally they'd had traditional offices and they've just recently hired in this company about 250 people. He said, all of them are going to be remote workers and their normal from here on out, for the next 150 they're looking to hire is just that business as usual will be remote work. And one of the other CIOs chimed in with a quote that really stuck out to me. He said, "Remote work requires always on infrastructure in this day and age." And it's just a whole new way of having to make sure that businesses are operational and their workers can do what they're supposed to do. >> Well, so let's stay on that. I mean, ransomware's on everybody's mind. I mean, all you have to do is look at the stock market, you see, what's happened with Zoom, it's exploded. All the end point securities, identity access management security companies are going crazy, because (chuckles) people are now so vulnerable. So, they're more exposed to ransomware, Ken, what do we really need to know about ransomware? First, the smart company, smart organization is the one that is prepared and assumes the worst. Which means don't think it can't happen to you, especially when you look at a couple of the more public examples in the last couple of years in particular. So, it means you must take steps to protect yourself, particularly for the sake of your company, your business, your employees, your shareholders, your customers, everyone else. And that means deploying technology that assumes that if the worst case scenario could happen to you, how do you make sure that you have taken the steps that you can avoid the worst possible scenarios that could happen? >> Well, you know, Doc, lot of times when you have this discussion on ransomware, people say, well, should I pay the ransom? And sometimes people say, well, yeah, maybe it should go. You hope you never get there, right? (chuckles) >> Right, you absolutely hope you never get there. There is such horrible examples of paying ransom that just don't work. Just look at the Somalia pirates as an example, right? It doesn't stop them at all, but, take a look at what the potential impact is, not the potential impact to your business and your employees, but the potential impact to society. A couple of years ago with Sony, was very notorious case. More recently, a couple of months ago, Garmin. As you mentioned, I'm a pilot, but I was very worried as what reservoir, a lot of people in the aircraft and in aviation industry. What's going to happen not only with our private information, the account information, but what's going to happen with avionics updates? If Garmin didn't have a fallback plan, a way to recover, then what was going to happen? And I'm sure they were going through the process and the thoughts of, should we pay this year? How else do we get out of this? But, fortunately they had a very good plan in place and it only took them a couple of days to restore back to normal operations. Arguably as far as avionics goes, they were lucky in the sense that this happened to them right in the middle of an update cycle, which is 28 day cycle. But the fact that it only took them a couple of days, congratulations to them. I'm sure that with even better plans and a little bit of extra effort, it could have been a matter of hours instead of days. >> Well, let's come back to business continuity. Ken, do you feel as though businesses are not prepared based on the conversation we were having earlier? >> Some are, some aren't. It will be getting into that, I think in a little bit more detail as well, but historically, organizations I think have focused far too much just on traditional disaster recovery, usually with things like some of the technologies that have been around a long while like backup, and onto often having focused towards the technologies that really do keep the business running without human intervention if something were to ever go wrong. >> So, Doc, anything you'd add to that? I mean, what's the state of business continuity from your perspective? Are people having to really starting to accelerate a journey because of this COVID? >> I absolutely think they're accelerating a journey. They're also looking now at, this concept of multiple active sites. The concept of active sites is not something new, it's something that dates back a couple of decades and a lot of the financial industry. When they were struck, they were looking at some very significant changes in their operational paradigm because they realized that the system is going down and is only a small percentage of the problem that people impact is far worse. The operational procedures, the human intervention. So, what they would do is typically build out multiple sites and rotate the applications between them. What they really haven't done yet, at least not on a broad scale and certainly not in the U.S and some cases in Europe, they started this journey, having applications running simultaneously in multiple sites accessing the same data sets. It's not a brand new concept, but it's something that has improved significantly. The technologies have improved significantly over the course of the past decade. And with the introduction of our active backend solution, a couple of years ago, even brought it to an entirely new level. >> The people aspect that Doc mentioned is so critical. And that's certainly been one of the key lessons learned when real disasters have occurred is that the systems have to be, if you really want to keep your business operating making an assumption that people are going to have depending upon the nature of the disaster. Very different priorities and one of them is not, Gee, do I keep these ITs systems running or not? They're going to be worried about their co-workers, their families, other things, et cetera. So, the ultimate has to be systems that are capable of continuing the operation of the business in the face of a site failure, a metropolitan area failure or whatever it takes without the requirement necessarily for human intervention. >> So, I want to get into active-active. But before we do, I wonder if we could do a little sort of data protection one on one, a back up, a replication, you got snapshots, Doc, what do we need to know about each in the context of this discussion? >> I think the important thing to look at when you think about the different types of technologies and say you apply the solutions is that some of them apply to specific equipment failures, and some of them apply to data failure. And I separate equipment from data in the sense that data can be corrupted in some shape or form. It can be through malicious attack, like ransomware as an example, only one example, other types of malware can play a factor as well, or it can be incidental. Somebody pressing the wrong button, it can be an operational procedure, perhaps another system failure that causes a change in the data or corruption in the data that makes it essentially unusable. So, whenever we're looking at this, we have to start with what is the recovery point objective. The RPO that's where most people start with. And in the RPO, in essence, if you think of time zero, right now, it's where the failure occurs. Walk backwards. How far back can I go and still sustain my business? Now, there may be other procedural things you can do to catch up as close to that RPO and zero as you can, but each of these technologies that we're talking about give you a different RPOs, like rewinding a tape back to a point in time. So, that's the first place to start. >> Okay. So, let's bring up that slide actually. I actually liked this as the fireball slide I call it, but this is how people measure sort of the business impact, if you will, RPO and RTO. And what I like about this is in this digital world, it's kind of a cliche, but everything's getting more intense. People want, they don't want to lose data when you ask a customer, how much data are you willing to lose? They say none. >> None. >> And you say, well, how much are you willing to pay? So, Ken, I wonder if you could sort of describe that tension and that dynamic that's really underscored in this slide. >> Yeah. Oh, yeah, you hit it on the head David. It's the traditional trade off between RPO, RTO and cost. As Doc described with RPO, the objective would be to get as close to zero data loss as you could possibly get, with RTO which measures the time associated with how long will it take you to get back to your acceptable level of RPO. That is a time factor where for every minute or second, that goes by that you're not in business, that's the extension of the RTO. And historically, the closer you get as you approach zero RPO and zero RTO, usually the greater the cost goes up. And it's always been the eternal trade off, is a great analogy. It's sort of like if you want to buy a car. RPO equates for the quality of the solution, RTO is time or speed and cost is cost. If you buy a car, if it's good and it's fast, it won't be cheap. If it's good, and it's cheap, it won't be fast. And if it's fast, and it's cheap, it won't be good. So, usually that's the kind of tradeoff we will have to deal with there. And, the factors that will impact that, as Doc alluded to can be many. There's many aspects that you have to consider in terms of what is the service level that the business requires, and do we have solutions in place that can actually give us what is the real service level of the business requires if something were to go bad. >> Because, customers have gone through, unnatural acts, and Doc before you were kind of describing what some people would refer to as, as a three site, data centers and all kinds of things that people will do, but that brings us to active-active, Doc, what is active-active? >> Yeah, let me interject a point there, and then I'll get to your question about active-active. First is the question I can raise about service level, that's absolutely critical. And business may have different service levels for different applications. >> Dave: Right. >> And you never really know what that is. For example, I was working with a university a few years back, you normally think, well, universities is where they worried about, they're worried about their grading systems. Everybody's always worried about their financial systems. This particular university was worried about their golf course reservations system. (laughs) And their number one mission critical application, and I'm sure there was a little chunk tongue and cheek there as well, was the golf course reservation system because that directly impacted, there were alumni and had a direct correlation to the incoming donations for the following year. So, you never know what's going to be mission critical. Closer to home working very recently, there's a great case study from Aultman Hospital on a website. One of the things that they did, which I thought was absolutely astounding, was they took advantage of our offer to loan them free storage for a while, leveraging some of the COD that they're passing on demand that they weren't using. One of the reasons that they wanted this extra capacity was so that they can make telepresence available to their patients to visit with their families. At a time when families can't go into the hospital visit, when people are ill, what a great comfort to their family. So, this is a great way to look at it. When you think about these different service levels now, and you think about the different types of replication technologies that are available. Look at the multisite, what is multisite really doing for you? Multisite is giving you some level of synchronous replication so that you have an RPO of zero recovery point objective. It still may not be an RTO or zero, but it will be darn close to it. But more importantly, it's giving you an additional site to really maintain that RPO of zero in case the disaster radius, the blast area, the impact zone is even further away. Now, this isn't going to prevent any type of malicious intent, it's not going to prevent the ransomware case, and things like that, but it'll certainly prevent the catastrophic failure of the data center. What does active-active do? Well, active-active now, gives you the read write capability. And now our multisite implementation by the way, leverages our active-active. So, gives you the ability now to have the simultaneously running instance of an application in multiple data centers, reading and writing from the same dataset. And what that gives you, is not only an RPO of zero, but an RTO of zero, because now you can have an application in another data center stand in and take over for it. Naturally, the application needs to be able to do that. There are a lot of applications that are capable of it. The Oracle parallel server or rack technology, gives you that capability. There are other types of clustering technologies that will fail almost instantaneously, that will give you that capability. So, that's where really active-active comes into play. >> Yeah, makes sense for me. When I started the industry, the VAX clusters were sort of the now thing, right? >> Yup. >> (indistinct) (Dave chuckles) >> All right. So, what are you seeing in the marketplace? Are you seeing... What's the adoption look like? Are there any differences that you see by region? What can you tell us there? >> Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the first organizations that obviously jumped on to active-active type solutions, were those where there were in particularly, in things like financial services, some compliance requirements or financial incentives or motivation to make sure that the business was always operational. And it's interesting because there was a study that was done all the way back in 2003, by Roper, that asked business executives and IT executives the same questions relative to their perceptions of their companies or organizations ability to meet RPO or RTO service level agreements. >> Right. And we have some data on this that I want to bring up. So, this is the RPO data but please carry on. >> Ken: Exactly, and so they asked questions that really were about RPO or RTO. Hey, if a disaster hit, would you lose data and how much? And what the data showed was that the business executives and IT executives in Europe, were actually pretty much on the same page. They both said, yeah, we probably would lose some data or a reasonable amounts associated with it. But what was a little frightening, was there appeared to be a chasm of disconnect between the business executives, from the IT executives in the U.S. And what it showed was that the IT executives were on the same page as the European IT executives and the business executives from Europe, saying that, yeah, we'd probably lose some data. But it showed that very few of the business executives thought that they would. And then similarly, when they were asked the question about RTO, how long would it take? In terms of days, hours, et cetera, for your full operation to be back in operational and granted they were talking in 2003 terms back then, which was a little longer than where the technology can now address it now. There was, again, this consistency between the IT executives in both continents and countries, as well as the European business executives, but again, a disconnect where the business executives in the U.S thought, oh, no, we'll be fine. We'll have everything back in a couple of days or less than, it won't be an issue. In my opinion, in looking at that data, when it first came out, my impression was, well, now I understand why a lot of business continuity projects don't get approved because the IT people know that they need it, but the business executives have, if I could be so bold, an unrealistically optimistic view of their ability to achieve RPO and RTO, I'll give you a great example. There was a major high tech company around that timeframe that actually had a major outage in their email system. And email was not perceived to be at the time, ultra mission critical application for them. I know it seems strange in this day and age, but back then it was considered sort of an afterthought and they had a four hour SLA in case something went down where, hey, if we're down for four hours, we get it back and four hours, we're fine. And so, IT thought, they were doing a great job, 'cause they got it back in less than four. It was about three point something. And it turned out that the real impact of the business was so overwhelming, they had to completely overhaul the IT infrastructure that they've put in place to deliver that. So, it's an interesting issue, and it's the kind of thing where, as a result, I believe that as we sit here today in 2020, the disconnect in the U.S still exists. If you look across Europe, you tend to find a lot of deployments of active-active. The first country that probably did a ton of it was Germany, and then, lot of the other European countries did as well. For a multitude of reasons, you tend to see a lot of active-active deployments in Europe, but you don't see anywhere near as many as if I could be so bold, we probably should be seeing in the U.S, and I believe a major contributing factor to that is that there is still this disconnect, between business executives having a false sense of security that is unfounded by the infrastructures that they have in place. And if they were to ask their IT people, and maybe that's a good idea for them to talk more, they'd probably find that they're more exposed than they ever realized. >> Right. And of course in Europe, you've got, much tighter proximity, and you're up against borders of a 200 mile or a 200 kilometer roll, governments have tried to impose here, really can't be imposed in a lot of cases. Okay. Let's get into what you guys are doing here in the space. So, Doc, how do you approach ensuring access to mission critical data? What's INFINIDAT's angle? >> Yeah, I think it's several different layers that need to be applied here. The first INFINIDAT angle starts with the fact that our storage is a hundred percent data availability guarantee. It's simple enough. It's triple redundant architecture, seven nines reliability design, which equates to 3.16 seconds per year of downtime, which is less than a scuzzy time (laughs) I bet you know. Let's start with just, right, forget the nonsense, the system's are a hundred percent available guaranteed. We put some teeth behind that, and that's a great way to start. It's not necessarily going to fundamentally protect your data from site outages and network outages and server outages and things like that, so, let's be fed up and can go to in active-active infrastructure. And now you can take the system and put it either elsewhere behind a firewall on the same data center floor, or in a metropolitan area. Wherever you need it to be, separate power zones, separate networks zones, make it even more available. And then if you really want to go that next level of protection because you're worried about regional outages and things of that nature, multisite replication. But now it's up the ante even further. Let's look at the malicious intent, let's look at the data corruption. Let's look at all of the other possibilities of things that can happen to your data. So, implement snapshotting technology, in this snapshot technology, and InfiniBox is essentially free. There's no cost for the software, there is no performance impact because it's part of metadata updates that are happening all the time anyway. So, there's zero additional overhead of that. There's no additional, there's no copying of data going on with a snapshot, so there's no additional cost penalty associated with it. And you can snapshot this frequently for a Snapshot any of your data frequently to protect against data corruption. And if you're worried about some sort of malicious aspect, that's going to engage and perhaps gain access to the snapshots, we have immutable technology, and that is also free. It's there, it doesn't cost you anything other than the time it takes for the administrator to determine what the policy is. And now that can not be modified. It can't be deleted, it can't be modified, it can't be updated, can't be written to your inside whatever the polyp the defined policy is. So, now you're protected, you're a hundred percent availability, increase data hundred percent availability with active-active, and then increase your RPO capability with dissonance and protect yourself against data corruption with immutable snapshots. Or some combination of standard snapshots and immutable snapshots. >> Yeah, so, I was going to ask Ken, if this is a cost effective approach, but, I mean, it's free, it comes in the stack. >> That is the key word, and you both just said it. Standard and included functionality all based on that great snapshot technology, which was the foundation for it that Doc described. Active-active, standard and included, the ability to go to a third site for disaster recovery at the industry's lowest asynchronous RPO with a remote site. Standard and included, immutable snaps, standard and included. So, compared to traditional views of what most people had back to our illustrious triangle earlier of RPO versus RTO versus cost, you're still going to have the additional cost of media and remote site for protecting your data, obviously, but in terms of software license costs, we're making it simpler, we're making it easier, we're making it standard and included, and we're just making it so much more readily available for organizations to be able to achieve superior RTO and RPO at a cost point that maybe certainly is a little bit higher than just having that single system that Doc alluded to, it's still a hundred percent available, but it's way below what the expectations of this industry have been over the last 20 years. >> Yeah, which is double, triple, I mean easily. Well, can I understand you for a second. You've worked for a lot of different storage companies, Doc you as well, but how different is this? How unique is this? >> There are surprisingly few vendors that can offer true zero RPO at two zero RTO. There's really only a handful. We're one of them. And by handful, I mean about three in the industry, including ourselves, and where I think we differentiate is fundamentally to a lot of those points we just mentioned. The software standard and included so we're not going to charge you extra for it. It's going to be relatively simple to deploy and integrate a stock alluded to earlier with server cluster software and the key components that people would use there in terms of databases and in terms of operating systems. And it's fundamentally going to be able to offer not just that zero RPO, zero RTO active-active environment, but if you do, and when you do need to go to a third site at distance for the true disaster recovery, if you ever lost a metropolitan area, we're going to be able to do it at an RPO that is lower than anything else on the market. >> Doc, are there complexities associated with doing this at petabyte scale? I mean, you guys make a big deal out of that, and you're clearly excited about it, but, is it extra hard to do at that kind of volume at scale? >> I'm going to give you two answers, and say, yes, it's incredibly difficult to do, but then I'm going to say it's incredibly easy for the customer to do because we've made it easy. There a lot of ramifications to doing things at petabyte scale. There's the size of the caching cables that you don't have to worry about. There's the numbers of things that need to be checked, and counter checked and constantly crosscheck for validity. There's also the scale of things that happen like silent data corruption that need to be factored in. All of those things are being done by InfiniBox, on a constant basis with no impact to the customer, no impact to the administrator, no impact to the running application. And I think that's a frankly, another differentiator as well. Ken and I have some common history as well. (chuckles) Used to constantly talk about internally, what happens as things get larger, systems slow down. That simply doesn't happen with InfiniBox. And that's why service providers use us as well. Cloud service providers managed service providers are some of our biggest customers. Because they know they can have these large scale systems running with all these different workloads, all these different functions, be they snapshots, clones, whatever they are, with no impact and very easy and rapid to deploy. >> Yeah, I set up top, you got to be storage hardos to make this stuff work. (laughs) It's very complicated and we've seen it for years and years. Last question. Again, huge changes in the last 150 days where people are just really tuned in to things like digital transformation, I talked about security, business resiliency, business continuity. Where... I'll start with you Ken, how should users be thinking about this? What steps should they be taking like now? >> What a great question. And back to sort of where we started, because of the nature of how things have changed, more applications are mission critical than they've ever been before. And providing, and always on infrastructure to make sure that you can give your users and your customers and your business, the opportunity to stay alive in the face of just about anything that could happen has never been more important in the history of this industry. >> Doc, I'll give you the final word, you can pile on that. >> I think Ken summed it up really well, but I'm going to take a different twist on it. It's all about de-risking, and a lot of the CIOs and CTOs of companies that I've been talking to over the course of the past couple of months, have basically said, hey, my digital transformation initiatives are on hold right now because I've got to keep the lights on, I've got to keep my business running. In some cases, maybe I've had to sadly pare down my staff, but I've got, remote workers have got to worry about. So, find a partner that's going to de-risk your infrastructure for you. Take a look at some of the things that we've announced in the past few months as well. We'll take a lot of that risk way, not only from the availability perspective, but we're going to take the risk away from a cost perspective. If you want to talk about INFINIDAT, don't worry about things like, how am I going to migrate over to it? We're going to do that for you. We're going to work with you, we're going to come up with a plan, we're going to make as much of it non-disruptive as we can, and we're going to assume the cost of doing it. We're going to take away all the risk of availability. We just talked about all of that. We're going to give you guarantees, that are a hundred percent availability. We'll help you architect the right solution for you and we'll protect you moving forward. You might need some flex area of capacity as you work through some of these new applications and new initiatives, so, you've got to be willing to take the risk away with our elastic pricing models. Use the storage when you need it, return it when you don't, and you don't have to pay for it anymore. We'll make it that simple for you. We'll give you that cloud operating paradigm on premises, and by the way, no egress costs. (Dave laughs) >> Well, this is a hard problem for people because they've had to do the work from home pivot, IT people, specifically, I mean, they've had to spend to shore up that infrastructure and of course, organizations just saying, well, we're going to pull from other places, but, look, if you're not digital today, you're not being able to transact business. And so, you can't relax your business continuity plans, in fact, you have to evolve them. Guys, thanks very much for sharing your perspectives and insights on this whole notion of de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Dave, is always a pleasure. Thank you. >> Cheers, and thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vallante for theCube, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to theCUBE, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about a very important topic around de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. This is critical, especially in the era of COVID. And with me, to really explore this issue is Dr. Rico, who's the vice president office of the CTO at INFINIDAT Doc. Good to see you. >> Good to see you again, Dave. >> And Ken Steinhardt, is also here as a field CTO at INFINIDAT and I got to tell the audience, Doc, you're also the chairman of the Mass Motorcycles Association. You're a very cool guy. You're a pilot, you're a firearms instructor, all about safety, and Ken and Doc you're both musicians, right? Doc, I think he played the drums, and Ken, I know when we first met, you're a music guy, so wow. Surrounded by talent so, thank you so much for coming on. >> Glad to be here. Great to see you. >> For the other thing too is that you guys are long time storage industry experts. I've known you both for many, many years. INFINIDAT deep engineering expertise of course, everybody knows about Moshay, he created the most successful product in the history of the storage industry. And we're going to talk about the importance of data, especially in this era of COVID, and how mission criticality has really become more and more important. So, I want to start Doc with you and this notion of business continuity. How are you thinking about, and INFINIDAT thinking about business continuity in this isolation era? >> Well, that's a really great question Dave, because it has changed quite a bit. And as you said, we've known each other a long time, all the way back to when I still had hair, that was (indistinct). But, business continuity is something that every business constantly looks at throughout their evolution. And it's one of these things where certain applications are typically more mission critical than others. And lately, what we've seen is this genre of a lights out data center that has become absolutely critical operating a business today. People can't just be on site anymore. People need to be working remotely, and that includes data center personnel and in many respects. So, this whole concept of business continuity now encompasses not only the operation equipment that's on premises, or sometimes even off premises, but it also encompasses applications that people need access to that they may not have thought of mission critical before, because working from home was a convenience or working remotely was a convenience, not a requirement for that business. >> You, Ken, I know you talked to a lot of CIOs. I was sitting at a CIO round table with my friends down at ETR recently, and one of the CIO said, when COVID hit, we realized that our business quote unquote business continuity plans were just way too narrowly focused on DR. What do you see from the IT community? >> It's funny because I literally was on a CIO round table with the West Coast this morning. And there were a couple of interesting comments that really stuck out to me from some of the people there. One was commenting of just reaffirming, what Doc said, how much people are working from home now. They said, traditionally they'd had traditional offices and they've just recently hired in this company about 250 people. He said, all of them are going to be remote workers and their normal from here on out, for the next 150 they're looking to hire is just that business as usual will be remote work. And one of the other CIOs chimed in with a quote that really stuck out to me. He said, "Remote work requires always on infrastructure in this day and age." And it's just a whole new way of having to make sure that businesses are operational and their workers can do what they're supposed to do. >> Well, so let's stay on that. I mean, ransomware's on everybody's mind. I mean, all you have to do is look at the stock market, you see, what's happened with Zoom, it's exploded. All the end point securities, identity access management security companies are going crazy, because (chuckles) people are now so vulnerable. So, they're more exposed to ransomware, Ken, what do we really need to know about ransomware? First, the smart company, smart organization is the one that is prepared and assumes the worst. Which means don't think it can't happen to you, especially when you look at a couple of the more public examples in the last couple of years in particular. So, it means you must take steps to protect yourself, particularly for the sake of your company, your business, your employees, your shareholders, your customers, everyone else. And that means deploying technology that assumes that if the worst case scenario could happen to you, how do you make sure that you have taken the steps that you can avoid the worst possible scenarios that could happen? >> Well, you know, Doc, lot of times when you have this discussion on ransomware, people say, well, should I pay the ransom? And sometimes people say, well, yeah, maybe it should go. You hope you never get there, right? (chuckles) >> Right, you absolutely hope you never get there. There is such horrible examples of paying ransom that just don't work. Just look at the Somalia pirates as an example, right? It doesn't stop them at all, but, take a look at what the potential impact is, not the potential impact to your business and your employees, but the potential impact to society. A couple of years ago with Sony, was very notorious case. More recently, a couple of months ago, Garmin. As you mentioned, I'm a pilot, but I was very worried as what reservoir, a lot of people in the aircraft and in aviation industry. What's going to happen not only with our private information, the account information, but what's going to happen with avionics updates? If Garmin didn't have a fallback plan, a way to recover, then what was going to happen? And I'm sure they were going through the process and the thoughts of, should we pay this year? How else do we get out of this? But, fortunately they had a very good plan in place and it only took them a couple of days to restore back to normal operations. Arguably as far as avionics goes, they were lucky in the sense that this happened to them right in the middle of an update cycle, which is 28 day cycle. But the fact that it only took them a couple of days, congratulations to them. I'm sure that with even better plans and a little bit of extra effort, it could have been a matter of hours instead of days. >> Well, let's come back to business continuity. Ken, do you feel as though businesses are not prepared based on the conversation we were having earlier? >> Some are, some aren't. It will be getting into that, I think in a little bit more detail as well, but historically, organizations I think have focused far too much just on traditional disaster recovery, usually with things like some of the technologies that have been around a long while like backup, and onto often having focused towards the technologies that really do keep the business running without human intervention if something were to ever go wrong. >> So, Doc, anything you'd add to that? I mean, what's the state of business continuity from your perspective? Are people having to really starting to accelerate a journey because of this COVID? >> I absolutely think they're accelerating a journey. They're also looking now at, this concept of multiple active sites. The concept of active sites is not something new, it's something that dates back a couple of decades and a lot of the financial industry. When they were struck, they were looking at some very significant changes in their operational paradigm because they realized that the system is going down and is only a small percentage of the problem that people impact is far worse. The operational procedures, the human intervention. So, what they would do is typically build out multiple sites and rotate the applications between them. What they really haven't done yet, at least not on a broad scale and certainly not in the U.S and some cases in Europe, they started this journey, having applications running simultaneously in multiple sites accessing the same data sets. It's not a brand new concept, but it's something that has improved significantly. The technologies have improved significantly over the course of the past decade. And with the introduction of our active backend solution, a couple of years ago, even brought it to an entirely new level. >> The people aspect that Doc mentioned is so critical. And that's certainly been one of the key lessons learned when real disasters have occurred is that the systems have to be, if you really want to keep your business operating making an assumption that people are going to have depending upon the nature of the disaster. Very different priorities and one of them is not, Gee, do I keep these ITs systems running or not? They're going to be worried about their co-workers, their families, other things, et cetera. So, the ultimate has to be systems that are capable of continuing the operation of the business in the face of a site failure, a metropolitan area failure or whatever it takes without the requirement necessarily for human intervention. >> So, I want to get into active-active. But before we do, I wonder if we could do a little sort of data protection one on one, a back up, a replication, you got snapshots, Doc, what do we need to know about each in the context of this discussion? >> I think the important thing to look at when you think about the different types of technologies and say you apply the solutions is that some of them apply to specific equipment failures, and some of them apply to data failure. And I separate equipment from data in the sense that data can be corrupted in some shape or form. It can be through malicious attack, like ransomware as an example, only one example, other types of malware can play a factor as well, or it can be incidental. Somebody pressing the wrong button, it can be an operational procedure, perhaps another system failure that causes a change in the data or corruption in the data that makes it essentially unusable. So, whenever we're looking at this, we have to start with what is the recovery point objective. The RPO that's where most people start with. And in the RPO, in essence, if you think of time zero, right now, it's where the failure occurs. Walk backwards. How far back can I go and still sustain my business? Now, there may be other procedural things you can do to catch up as close to that RPO and zero as you can, but each of these technologies that we're talking about give you a different RPOs, like rewinding a tape back to a point in time. So, that's the first place to start. >> Okay. So, let's bring up that slide actually. I actually liked this as the fireball slide I call it, but this is how people measure sort of the business impact, if you will, RPO and RTO. And what I like about this is in this digital world, it's kind of a cliche, but everything's getting more intense. People want, they don't want to lose data when you ask a customer, how much data are you willing to lose? They say none. >> None. >> And you say, well, how much are you willing to pay? So, Ken, I wonder if you could sort of describe that tension and that dynamic that's really underscored in this slide. >> Yeah. Oh, yeah, you hit it on the head David. It's the traditional trade off between RPO, RTO and cost. As Doc described with RPO, the objective would be to get as close to zero data loss as you could possibly get, with RTO which measures the time associated with how long will it take you to get back to your acceptable level of RPO. That is a time factor where for every minute or second, that goes by that you're not in business, that's the extension of the RTO. And historically, the closer you get as you approach zero RPO and zero RTO, usually the greater the cost goes up. And it's always been the eternal trade off, is a great analogy. It's sort of like if you want to buy a car. RPO equates for the quality of the solution, RTO is time or speed and cost is cost. If you buy a car, if it's good and it's fast, it won't be cheap. If it's good, and it's cheap, it won't be fast. And if it's fast, and it's cheap, it won't be good. So, usually that's the kind of tradeoff we will have to deal with there. And, the factors that will impact that, as Doc alluded to can be many. There's many aspects that you have to consider in terms of what is the service level that the business requires, and do we have solutions in place that can actually give us what is the real service level of the business requires if something were to go back? >> Because, customers have gone through, unnatural acts, and Doc before you were kind of describing what some people would refer to as, as a three site, data centers and all kinds of things that people will do, but that brings us to active-active, Doc, what is active-active? >> Yeah, let me interject a point there, and then I'll get to your question about active-active. First is the question I can raise about service level, that's absolutely critical. And business may have different service levels for different applications. >> Dave: Right. >> And you never really know what that is. For example, I was working with a university a few years back, you normally think, well, universities is where they worried about, they're worried about their grading systems. Everybody's always worried about their financial systems. This particular university was worried about their golf course reservations system. (laughs) And their number one mission critical application, and I'm sure there was a little chunk tongue and cheek there as well, was the golf course reservation system because that directly impacted, there were alumni and had a direct correlation to the incoming donations for the following year. So, you never know what's going to be mission critical. Closer to home working very recently, there's a great case study from Aultman Hospital on a website. One of the things that they did, which I thought was absolutely astounding, was they took advantage of our offer to loan them free storage for a while, leveraging some of the COD that they're passing on demand that they weren't using. One of the reasons that they wanted this extra capacity was so that they can make telepresence available to their patients to visit with their families. At a time when families can't go into the hospital visit, when people are ill, what a great comfort to their family. So, this is a great way to look at it. When you think about these different service levels now, and you think about the different types of replication technologies that are available. Look at the multisite, what is multisite really doing for you? Multisite is giving you some level of synchronous replication so that you have an RPO of zero recovery point objective. It still may not be an RTO or zero, but it will be darn close to it. But more importantly, it's giving you an additional site to really maintain that RPO of zero in case the disaster radius, the blast area, the impact zone is even further away. Now, this isn't going to prevent any type of malicious intent, it's not going to prevent the ransomware case, and things like that, but it'll certainly prevent the catastrophic failure of the data center. What does active-active do? Well, active-active now, gives you the read write capability. And now our multisite implementation by the way, leverages our active-active. So, gives you the ability now to have the simultaneously running instance of an application in multiple data centers, reading and writing from the same dataset. And what that gives you, is not only an RPO of zero, but an RTO of zero, because now you can have an application in another data center stand in and take over for it. Naturally, the application needs to be able to do that. There are a lot of applications that are capable of it. The Oracle parallel server or rack technology, gives you that capability. There are other types of clustering technologies that will fail almost instantaneously, that will give you that capability. So, that's where really active-active comes into play. >> Yeah, makes sense for me. When I started the industry, the VAX clusters were sort of the now thing, right? >> Yup. >> (indistinct) (Dave chuckles) >> All right. So, what are you seeing in the marketplace? Are you seeing... What's the adoption look like? Are there any differences that you see by region? What can you tell us there? >> Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the first organizations that obviously jumped on to active-active type solutions, were those where there were in particularly, in things like financial services, some compliance requirements or financial incentives or motivation to make sure that the business was always operational. And it's interesting because there was a study that was done all the way back in 2003, by Roper, that asked business executives and IT executives the same questions relative to their perceptions of their companies or organizations ability to meet RPO or RTO service level agreements. >> Right. And we have some data on this that I want to bring up. So, this is the RPO data but please carry on. >> Ken: Exactly, and so they asked questions that really were about RPO or RTO. Hey, if a disaster hit, would you lose data and how much? And what the data showed was that the business executives and IT executives in Europe, were actually pretty much on the same page. They both said, yeah, we probably would lose some data or a reasonable amounts associated with it. But what was a little frightening, was there appeared to be a chasm of disconnect between the business executives, from the IT executives in the U.S. And what it showed was that the IT executives were on the same page as the European IT executives and the business executives from Europe, saying that, yeah, we'd probably lose some data. But it showed that very few of the business executives thought that they would. And then similarly, when they were asked the question about RTO, how long would it take? In terms of days, hours, et cetera, for your full operation to be back in operational and granted they were talking in 2003 terms back then, which was a little longer than where the technology can now address it now. There was, again, this consistency between the IT executives in both continents and countries, as well as the European business executives, but again, a disconnect where the business executives in the U.S thought, oh, no, we'll be fine. We'll have everything back in a couple of days or less than, it won't be an issue. In my opinion, in looking at that data, when it first came out, my impression was, well, now I understand why a lot of business continuity projects don't get approved because the IT people know that they need it, but the business executives have, if I could be so bold and unrealistically optimistic view of their ability to achieve RPO and RTO, I'll give you a great example. There was a major high tech company around that timeframe that actually had a major outage in their email system. And email was not perceived to be at the time, ultra mission critical application for them. I know it seems strange in this day and age, but back then it was considered sort of an afterthought and they had a four hour SLA in case something went down where, hey, if we're down for four hours, we get it back and four hours, we're fine. And so, IT thought, they were doing a great job, 'cause they got it back in less than four. It was about three point something. And it turned out that the real impact of the business was so overwhelming, they had to completely overhaul the IT infrastructure that they've put in place to deliver that. So, it's an interesting issue, and it's the kind of thing where, as a result, I believe that as we sit here today in 2020, the disconnect in the U.S still exists. If you look across Europe, you tend to find a lot of deployments of active-active. The first country that probably did a ton of it was Germany, and then, lot of the other European countries did as well. For a multitude of reasons, you tend to see a lot of active-active deployments in Europe, but you don't see anywhere near as many as if I could be so bold, we probably should be seeing in the U.S, and I believe a major contributing factor to that is that there is still this disconnect, between business executives having a false sense of security that is unfounded by the infrastructures that they have in place. And if they were to ask their IT people, and maybe that's a good idea for them to talk more, they'd probably find that they're more exposed than they ever realized. >> Right. And of course in Europe, you've got, much tighter proximity, and you're up against borders of a 200 mile or a 200 kilometer roll, governments have tried to impose here, really can't be imposed in a lot of cases. Okay. Let's get into what you guys are doing here in the space. So, Doc, how do you approach ensuring access to mission critical data? What's INFINIDAT's angle? >> Yeah, I think it's several different layers that need to be applied here. The first INFINIDAT angle starts with the fact that our storage is a hundred percent data availability guarantee. It's simple enough. It's triple redundant architecture, seven nines reliability design, which equates to 3.16 seconds per year of downtime, which is less than a scuzzy time (laughs) I bet you know. Let's start with just, right, forget the nonsense, the system's are a hundred percent available guaranteed. We put some teeth behind that, and that's a great way to start. It's not necessarily going to fundamentally protect your data from site outages and network outages and server outages and things like that, so, let's be fed up and can go to in active-active infrastructure. And now you can take the system and put it either elsewhere behind a firewall on the same data center floor, or in a metropolitan area. Wherever you need it to be, separate power zones, separate networks zones, make it even more available. And then if you really want to go that next level of protection because you're worried about regional outages and things of that nature, multisite replication. But now it's up the ante even further. Let's look at the malicious intent, let's look at the data corruption. Let's look at all of the other possibilities of things that can happen to your data. So, implement snapshotting technology, in this snapshot technology, and InfiniBox is essentially free. There's no cost for the software, there is no performance impact because it's part of metadata updates that are happening all the time anyway. So, there's zero additional overhead of that. There's no additional, there's no copying of data going on with a snapshot, so there's no additional cost penalty associated with it. And you can snapshot this frequently for a Snapshot any of your data frequently to protect against data corruption. And if you're worried about some sort of malicious aspect, that's going to engage and perhaps gain access to the snapshots, we have immutable technology, and that is also free. It's there, it doesn't cost you anything other than the time it takes for the administrator to determine what the policy is. And now that can not be modified. It can't be deleted, it can't be modified, it can't be updated, can't be written to your inside whatever the polyp the defined policy is. So, now you're protected, you're a hundred percent availability, increase data hundred percent availability with active-active, and then increase your RPO capability with dissonance and protect yourself against data corruption with immutable snapshots. Or some combination of standard snapshots and immutable snapshots. >> Yeah, so, I was going to ask Ken, if this is a cost effective approach, but, I mean, it's free, it comes in the stuff. >> That is the key word, and you both just said it. Standard and included functionality all based on that great snapshot technology, which was the foundation for it that Doc described. Active-active, standard and included, the ability to go to a third site for disaster recovery at the industry's lowest asynchronous RPO with a remote site. Standard and included, immutable snaps, standard and included. So, compared to traditional views of what most people had back to our illustrious triangle earlier of RPO versus RTO versus cost, you're still going to have the additional cost of media and remote site for protecting your data, obviously, but in terms of software license costs, we're making it simpler, we're making it easier, we're making it standard and included, and we're just making it so much more readily available for organizations to be able to achieve superior RTO and RPO at a cost point that maybe certainly is a little bit higher than just having that single system that Doc alluded to, it's still a hundred percent available, but it's way below what the expectations of this industry have been over the last 20 years. >> Yeah, which is double, triple, I mean easily. Well, can I understand you for a second. You've worked for a lot of different storage companies, Doc you as well, but how different is this? How unique is this? >> There are surprisingly few vendors that can offer true zero RPO at two zero RTO. There's really only a handful. We're one of them. And by handful, I mean about three in the industry, including ourselves, and where I think we differentiate is fundamentally to a lot of those points we just mentioned. The software standard and included so we're not going to charge you extra for it. It's going to be relatively simple to deploy and integrate a stock alluded to earlier with server cluster software and the key components that people would use there in terms of databases and in terms of operating systems. And it's fundamentally going to be able to offer not just that zero RPO, zero RTO active-active environment, but if you do, and when you do need to go to a third site at distance for the true disaster recovery, if you ever lost a metropolitan area, we're going to be able to do it at an RPO that is lower than anything else on the market. >> Doc, are there complexities associated with doing this at petabyte scale? I mean, you guys make a big deal out of that, and you're clearly excited about it, but, is it extra hard to do at that kind of volume at scale? >> I'm going to give you two answers, and say, yes, it's incredibly difficult to do, but then I'm going to say it's incredibly easy for the customer to do because we've made it easy. There a lot of ramifications to doing things at petabyte scale. There's the size of the caching cables that you don't have to worry about. There's the numbers of things that need to be checked, and counter checked and constantly crosscheck for validity. There's also the scale of things that happen like silent data corruption that need to be factored in. All of those things are being done by InfiniBox, on a constant basis with no impact to the customer, no impact to the administrator, no impact to the running application. And I think that's a frankly, another differentiator as well. Ken and I have some common history as well. (chuckles) Used to constantly talk about internally, what happens as things get larger, systems slow down. That simply doesn't happen with InfiniBox. And that's why service providers use us as well. Cloud service providers managed service providers are some of our biggest customers. Because they know they can have these large scale systems running with all these different workloads, all these different functions, be they snapshots, clones, whatever they are, with no impact and very easy and rapid to deploy. >> Yeah, I set up top, you got to be storage hardos to make this stuff work. (laughs) It's very complicated and we've seen it for years and years. Last question. Again, huge changes in the last 150 days where people are just really tuned in to things like digital transformation, I talked about security, business resiliency, business continuity. Where... I'll start with you Ken, how should users be thinking about this? What steps should they be taking like now? >> What a great question. And back to sort of where we started, because of the nature of how things have changed, more applications are mission critical than they've ever been before. And providing, and always on infrastructure to make sure that you can give your users and your customers and your business, the opportunity to stay alive in the face of just about anything that could happen has never been more important in the history of this industry. >> Doc, I'll give you the final word, you can pile on that. >> I think Ken summed it up really well, but I'm going to take a different twist on it. It's all about de-risking, and a lot of the CIOs and CTOs of companies that I've been talking to over the course of the past couple of months, have basically said, hey, my digital transformation initiatives are on hold right now because I've got to keep the lights on, I've got to keep my business running. In some cases, maybe I've had to sadly pare down my staff, but I've got, remote workers have got to worry about. So, find a partner that's going to de-risk your infrastructure for you. Take a look at some of the things that we've announced in the past few months as well. We'll take a lot of that risk way, not only from the availability perspective, but we're going to take the risk away from a cost perspective. If you want to talk about INFINIDAT, don't worry about things like, how am I going to migrate over to it? We're going to do that for you. We're going to work with you, we're going to come up with a plan, we're going to make as much of it non-disruptive as we can, and we're going to assume the cost of doing it. We're going to take away all the risk of availability. We just talked about all of that. We're going to give you guarantees, that are a hundred percent availability. We'll help you architect the right solution for you and we'll protect you moving forward. You might need some flex area of capacity as you work through some of these new applications and new initiatives, so, you've got to be willing to take the risk away with our elastic pricing models. Use the storage when you need it, return it when you don't, and you don't have to pay for it anymore. We'll make it that simple for you. We'll give you that cloud operating paradigm on premises, and by the way, no egress costs. (Dave laughs) >> Well, this is a hard problem for people because they've had to do the work from home pivot, IT people, specifically, I mean, they've had to spend to shore up that infrastructure and of course, organizations just saying, well, we're going to pull from other places, but, look, if you're not digital today, you're not being able to transact business. And so, you can't relax your business continuity plans, in fact, you have to evolve them. Guys, thanks very much for sharing your perspectives and insights on this whole notion of de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Dave, is always a pleasure. Thank you. >> Cheers, and thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vallante for theCube, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Yeah, it's the queue covering the virtual vertical Big Data Conference 2020 Brought to You by vertical. >>Welcome back, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching the Cube's coverage of the verdict of Virtual Big Data conference. The Cube has been at every BTC, and it's our pleasure in these difficult times to be covering BBC as a virtual event. This digital program really excited to have Joy King joining us. Joy is the vice president of product and go to market strategy in particular. And if that weren't enough, he also runs marketing and education curve for him. So, Joe, you're a multi tool players. You've got the technical side and the marketing gene, So welcome to the Cube. You're always a great guest. Love to have you on. >>Thank you so much, David. The pleasure, it really is. >>So I want to get in. You know, we'll have some time. We've been talking about the conference and the virtual event, but I really want to dig in to the product stuff. It's a big day for you guys. You announced 10.0. But before we get into the announcements, step back a little bit you know, you guys are riding the waves. I've said to ah, number of our guests that that brick has always been good. It riding the wave not only the initial MPP, but you you embraced, embraced HD fs. You embrace data science and analytics and in the cloud. So one of the trends that you see the big waves that you're writing >>Well, you're absolutely right, Dave. I mean, what what I think is most interesting and important is because verdict is, at its core a true engineering culture founded by, well, a pretty famous guy, right, Dr Stone Breaker, who embedded that very technical vertical engineering culture. It means that we don't pretend to know everything that's coming, but we are committed to embracing the tech. An ology trends, the innovations, things like that. We don't pretend to know it all. We just do it all. So right now, I think I see three big imminent trends that we are addressing. And matters had we have been for a while, but that are particularly relevant right now. The first is a combination of, I guess, a disappointment in what Hadoop was able to deliver. I always feel a little guilty because she's a very reasonably capable elephant. She was designed to be HD fs highly distributed file store, but she cant be an entire zoo, so there's a lot of disappointment in the market, but a lot of data. In HD FM, you combine that with some of the well, not some the explosion of cloud object storage. You're talking about even more data, but even more data silos. So data growth and and data silos is Trend one. Then what I would say Trend, too, is the cloud Reality Cloud brings so many events. There are so many opportunities that public cloud computing delivers. But I think we've learned enough now to know that there's also some reality. The cloud providers themselves. Dave. Don't talk about it well, because not, is it more agile? Can you do things without having to manage your own data center? Of course you can. That the reality is it's a little more pricey than we expected. There are some security and privacy concerns. There's some workloads that can go to the cloud, so hybrid and also multi cloud deployments are the next trend that are mandatory. And then maybe the one that is the most exciting in terms of changing the world we could use. A little change right now is operationalize in machine learning. There's so much potential in the technology, but it's somehow has been stuck for the most part in science projects and data science lab, and the time is now to operationalize it. Those are the three big trends that vertical is focusing on right now. >>That's great. I wonder if I could ask you a couple questions about that. I mean, I like you have a soft spot in my heart for the and the thing about the Hadoop that that was, I think, profound was it got people thinking about, you know, bringing compute to the data and leaving data in place, and it really got people thinking about data driven cultures. It didn't solve all the problems, but it collected a lot of data that we can now take your third trend and apply machine intelligence on top of that data. And then the cloud is really the ability to scale, and it gives you that agility and that it's not really that cloud experience. It's not not just the cloud itself, it's bringing the cloud experience to wherever the data lives. And I think that's what I'm hearing from you. Those are the three big super powers of innovation today. >>That's exactly right. So, you know, I have to say I think we all know that Data Analytics machine learning none of that delivers real value unless the volume of data is there to be able to truly predict and influence the future. So the last 7 to 10 years has been correctly about collecting the data, getting the data into a common location, and H DFS was well designed for that. But we live in a capitalist world, and some companies stepped in and tried to make HD Fs and the broader Hadoop ecosystem be the single solution to big data. It's not true. So now that the key is, how do we take advantage of all of that data? And now that's exactly what verdict is focusing on. So as you know, we began our journey with vertical back in the day in 2007 with our first release, and we saw the growth of the dupe. So we announced many years ago verdict a sequel on that. The idea to be able to deploy vertical on Hadoop nodes and query the data in Hadoop. We wanted to help. Now with Verdict A 10. We are also introducing vertical in eon mode, and we can talk more about that. But Verdict and Ian Mode for HDs, This is a way to apply it and see sequel database management platform to H DFS infrastructure and data in each DFS file storage. And that is a great way to leverage the investment that so many companies have made in HD Fs. And I think it's fair to the elephant to treat >>her well. Okay, let's get into the hard news and auto. Um, she's got, but you got a mature stack, but one of the highlights of append auto. And then we can drill into some of the technologies >>Absolutely so in well in 2018 vertical announced vertical in Deon mode is the separation of compute from storage. Now this is a great example of vertical embracing innovation. Vertical was designed for on premises, data centers and bare metal servers, tightly coupled storage de l three eighties from Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Dell, etcetera. But we saw that cloud computing was changing fundamentally data center architectures, and it made sense to separate compute from storage. So you add compute when you need compute. You add storage when you need storage. That's exactly what the cloud's introduced, but it was only available on the club. So first thing we did was architect vertical and EON mode, which is not a new product. Eight. This is really important. It's a deployment option. And in 2018 our customers had the opportunity to deploy their vertical licenses in EON mode on AWS in September of 2019. We then broke an important record. We brought cloud architecture down to earth and we announced vertical in eon mode so vertical with communal or shared storage, leveraging pure storage flash blade that gave us all the advantages of separating compute from storage. All of the workload, isolation, the scale up scale down the ability to manage clusters. And we did that with on Premise Data Center. And now, with vertical 10 we are announcing verdict in eon mode on HD fs and vertically on mode on Google Cloud. So what we've got here, in summary, is vertical Andy on mode, multi cloud and multiple on premise data that storage, and that gives us the opportunity to help our customers both with the hybrid and multi cloud strategies they have and unifying their data silos. But America 10 goes farther. >>Well, let me stop you there, because I just wanna I want to mention So we talked to Joe Gonzalez and past Mutual, who essentially, he was brought in. And one of this task was the lead into eon mode. Why? Because I'm asking. You still had three separate data silos and they wanted to bring those together. They're investing heavily in technology. Joe is an expert, though that really put data at their core and beyond Mode was a key part of that because they're using S three and s o. So that was Ah, very important step for those guys carry on. What else do we need to know about? >>So one of the reasons, for example, that Mass Mutual is so excited about John Mode is because of the operational advantages. You think about exactly what Joe told you about multiple clusters serving must multiple use cases and maybe multiple divisions. And look, let's be clear. Marketing doesn't always get along with finance and finance doesn't necessarily get along with up, and I t is often caught the middle. Erica and Dion mode allows workload, isolation, meaning allocating the compute resource is that different use cases need without allowing them to interfere with other use cases and allowing everybody to access the data. So it's a great way to bring the corporate world together but still protect them from each other. And that's one of the things that Mass Mutual is going to benefit from, as well, so many of >>our other customers I also want to mention. So when I saw you, ah, last last year at the Pure Storage Accelerate conference just today we are the only company that separates you from storage that that runs on Prem and in the cloud. And I was like I had to think about it. I've researched. I still can't find anybody anybody else who doesn't know. I want to mention you beat actually a number of the cloud players with that capability. So good job and I think is a differentiator, assuming that you're giving me that cloud experience and the licensing and the pricing capability. So I want to talk about that a little >>bit. Well, you're absolutely right. So let's be clear. There is no question that the public cloud public clouds introduced the separation of compute storage and these advantages that they do not have the ability or the interest to replicate that on premise for vertical. We were born to be software only. We make no money on underlying infrastructure. We don't charge as a package for the hardware underneath, so we are totally motivated to be independent of that and also to continuously optimize the software to be as efficient as possible. And we do the exact same thing to your question about life. Cloud providers charge for note indignance. That's how they charge for their underlying infrastructure. Well, in some cases, if you're being, if you're talking about a use case where you have a whole lot of data, but you don't necessarily have a lot of compute for that workload, it may make sense to pay her note. Then it's unlimited data. But what if you have a huge compute need on a relatively small data set that's not so good? Vertical offers per node and four terabyte for our customers, depending on their use case, we also offer perpetual licenses for customers who want capital. But we also offer subscription for companies that they Nope, I have to have opt in. And while this can certainly cause some complexity for our field organization, we know that it's all about choice, that everybody in today's world wants it personalized just for me. And that's exactly what we're doing with our pricing in life. >>So just to clarify, you're saying I can pay by the drink if I want to. You're not going to force me necessarily into a term or Aiken choose to have, you know, more predictable pricing. Is that, Is that correct? >>Well, so it's partially correct. The first verdict, a subscription licensing is a fixed amount for the period of the subscription. We do that so many of our customers cannot, and I'm one of them, by the way, cannot tell finance what the budgets forecast is going to be for the quarter after I spent you say what it's gonna be before, So our subscription facing is a fixed amount for a period of time. However, we do respect the fact that some companies do want usage based pricing. So on AWS, you can use verdict up by the hour and you pay by the hour. We are about to launch the very same thing on Google Cloud. So for us, it's about what do you need? And we make it happen natively directly with us or through AWS and Google Cloud. >>So I want to send so the the fixed isn't some floor. And then if you want a surge above that, you can allow usage pricing. If you're on the cloud, correct. >>Well, you actually license your cluster vertical by the hour on AWS and you run your cluster there. Or you can buy a license from vertical or a fixed capacity or a fixed number of nodes and deploy it on the cloud. And then, if you want to add more nodes or add more capacity, you can. It's not usage based for the license that you bring to the cloud. But if you purchase through the cloud provider, it is usage. >>Yeah, okay. And you guys are in the marketplace. Is that right? So, again, if I want up X, I can do that. I can choose to do that. >>That's awesome. Next usage through the AWS marketplace or yeah, directly from vertical >>because every small business who then goes to a salesforce management system knows this. Okay, great. I can pay by the month. Well, yeah, Well, not really. Here's our three year term in it, right? And it's very frustrating. >>Well, and even in the public cloud you can pay for by the hour by the minute or whatever, but it becomes pretty obvious that you're better off if you have reserved instance types or committed amounts in that by vertical offers subscription. That says, Hey, you want to have 100 terabytes for the next year? Here's what it will cost you. We do interval billing. You want to do monthly orderly bi annual will do that. But we won't charge you for usage that you didn't even know you were using until after you get the bill. And frankly, that's something my finance team does not like. >>Yeah, I think you know, I know this is kind of a wonky discussion, but so many people gloss over the licensing and the pricing, and I think my take away here is Optionality. You know, pricing your way of That's great. Thank you for that clarification. Okay, so you got Google Cloud? I want to talk about storage. Optionality. If I found him up, I got history. I got I'm presuming Google now of you you're pure >>is an s three compatible storage yet So your story >>Google object store >>like Google object store Amazon s three object store HD fs pure storage flash blade, which is an object store on prim. And we are continuing on this theft because ultimately we know that our customers need the option of having next generation data center architecture, which is sort of shared or communal storage. So all the data is in one place. Workloads can be managed independently on that data, and that's exactly what we're doing. But what we already have in two public clouds and to on premise deployment options today. And as you said, I did challenge you back when we saw each other at the conference. Today, vertical is the only analytic data warehouse platform that offers that option on premise and in multiple public clouds. >>Okay, let's talk about the ah, go back through the innovation cocktail. I'll call it So it's It's the data applying machine intelligence to that data. And we've talked about scaling at Cloud and some of the other advantages of Let's Talk About the Machine Intelligence, the machine learning piece of it. What's your story there? Give us any updates on your embracing of tooling and and the like. >>Well, quite a few years ago, we began building some in database native in database machine learning algorithms into vertical, and the reason we did that was we knew that the architecture of MPP Columbia execution would dramatically improve performance. We also knew that a lot of people speak sequel, but at the time, not so many people spoke R or even Python. And so what if we could give act us to machine learning in the database via sequel and deliver that kind of performance? So that's the journey we started out. And then we realized that actually, machine learning is a lot more as everybody knows and just algorithms. So we then built in the full end to end machine learning functions from data preparation to model training, model scoring and evaluation all the way through to fold the point and all of this again sequel accessible. You speak sequel. You speak to the data and the other advantage of this approach was we realized that accuracy was compromised if you down sample. If you moved a portion of the data from a database to a specialty machine learning platform, you you were challenged by accuracy and also what the industry is calling replica ability. And that means if a model makes a decision like, let's say, credit scoring and that decision isn't anyway challenged, well, you have to be able to replicate it to prove that you made the decision correctly. And there was a bit of, ah, you know, blow up in the media not too long ago about a credit scoring decision that appeared to be gender bias. But unfortunately, because the model could not be replicated, there was no way to this Prove that, and that was not a good thing. So all of this is built in a vertical, and with vertical 10. We've taken the next step, just like with with Hadoop. We know that innovation happens within vertical, but also outside of vertical. We saw that data scientists really love their preferred language. Like python, they love their tools and platforms like tensor flow with vertical 10. We now integrate even more with python, which we have for a while, but we also integrate with tensorflow integration and PM ML. What does that mean? It means that if you build and train a model external to vertical, using the machine learning platform that you like, you can import that model into a vertical and run it on the full end to end process. But run it on all the data. No more accuracy challenges MPP Kilometer execution. So it's blazing fast. And if somebody wants to know why a model made a decision, you can replicate that model, and you can explain why those are very powerful. And it's also another cultural unification. Dave. It unifies the business analyst community who speak sequel with the data scientist community who love their tools like Tensorflow and Python. >>Well, I think joy. That's important because so much of machine intelligence and ai there's a black box problem. You can't replicate the model. Then you do run into a potential gender bias. In the example that you're talking about there in their many you know, let's say an individual is very wealthy. He goes for a mortgage and his wife goes for some credit she gets rejected. He gets accepted this to say it's the same household, but the bias in the model that may be gender bias that could be race bias. And so being able to replicate that in and open up and make the the machine intelligence transparent is very, very important, >>It really is. And that replica ability as well as accuracy. It's critical because if you're down sampling and you're running models on different sets of data, things can get confusing. And yet you don't really have a choice. Because if you're talking about petabytes of data and you need to export that data to a machine learning platform and then try to put it back and get the next at the next day, you're looking at way too much time doing it in the database or training the model and then importing it into the database for production. That's what vertical allows, and our customers are. So it right they reopens. Of course, you know, they are the ones that are sort of the Trailblazers they've always been, and ah, this is the next step. In blazing the ML >>thrill joint customers want analytics. They want functional analytics full function. Analytics. What are they pushing you for now? What are you delivering? What's your thought on that? >>Well, I would say the number one thing that our customers are demanding right now is deployment. Flexibility. What? What the what the CEO or the CFO mandated six months ago? Now shout Whatever that thou shalt is is different. And they would, I tell them is it is impossible. No, what you're going to be commanded to do or what options you might have in the future. The key is not having to choose, and they are very, very committed to that. We have a large telco customer who is multi cloud as their commit. Why multi cloud? Well, because they see innovation available in different public clouds. They want to take advantage of all of them. They also, admittedly, the that there's the risk of lock it right. Like any vendor, they don't want that either, so they want multi cloud. We have other customers who say we have some workloads that make sense for the cloud and some that we absolutely cannot in the cloud. But we want a unified analytics strategy, so they are adamant in focusing on deployment flexibility. That's what I'd say is 1st 2nd I would say that the interest in operationalize in machine learning but not necessarily forcing the analytics team to hammer the data science team about which tools or the best tools. That's the probably number two. And then I'd say Number three. And it's because when you look at companies like Uber or the Trade Desk or A T and T or Cerner performance at scale, when they say milliseconds, they think that flow. When they say petabytes, they're like, Yeah, that was yesterday. So performance at scale good enough for vertical is never good enough. And it's why we're constantly building at the core the next generation execution engine, database designer, optimization engine, all that stuff >>I wanna also ask you. When I first started following vertical, we covered the cube covering the BBC. One of things I noticed was in talking to customers and people in the community is that you have a community edition, uh, free addition, and it's not neutered ais that have you maintain that that ethos, you know, through the transitions into into micro focus. And can you talk about that a little bit >>absolutely vertical community edition is vertical. It's all of the verdict of functionality geospatial time series, pattern matching, machine learning, all of the verdict, vertical neon mode, vertical and enterprise mode. All vertical is the community edition. The only limitation is one terabyte of data and three notes, and it's free now. If you want commercial support, where you can file a support ticket and and things like that, you do have to buy the life. But it's free, and we people say, Well, free for how long? Like our field? I've asked that and I say forever and what he said, What do you mean forever? Because we want people to use vertical for use cases that are small. They want to learn that they want to try, and we see no reason to limit that. And what we look for is when they're ready to grow when they need the next set of data that goes beyond a terabyte or they need more compute than three notes, then we're here for them, and it also brings up an important thing that I should remind you or tell you about Davis. You haven't heard it, and that's about the Vertical Academy Academy that vertical dot com well, what is that? That is, well, self paced on demand as well as vertical essential certification. Training and certification means you have seven days with your hands on a vertical cluster hosted in the cloud to go through all the certification. And guess what? All of that is free. Why why would you give it for free? Because for us empowering the market, giving the market the expert East, the learning they need to take advantage of vertical, just like with Community Edition is fundamental to our mission because we see the advantage that vertical can bring. And we want to make it possible for every company all around the world that take advantage >>of it. I love that ethos of vertical. I mean, obviously great product. But it's not just the product. It's the business practices and really progressive progressive pricing and embracing of all these trends and not running away from the waves but really leaning in joy. Thanks so much. Great interview really appreciate it. And, ah, I wished we could have been faced face in Boston, but I think it's prudent thing to do, >>I promise you, Dave we will, because the verdict of BTC and 2021 is already booked. So I will see you there. >>Haas enjoyed King. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. And thank you for watching. Remember, the Cube is running this program in conjunction with the virtual vertical BDC goto vertical dot com slash BBC 2020 for all the coverage and keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante with the Cube. We'll be right back. >>Yeah, >>yeah, yeah.

>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I f s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I >>f. S, I say, What a minute. I didn't cash it. Everybody welcome to I f s World 2019. You watching the Cube? The leader in live tech coverage on day Volante with my co host, Paul Galen. Marty Martin is here. She is the president of the service management division of I F s and C e o of work wave. Marty, good to see you. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm so excited. >>A lot of action going on. You guys. Service management, Field Service management particular. You guys had an acquisition today. We're gonna talk about Let's start with your role you came in and 2017 with the >>pretty acting. Actually, >>2018 finalized the acquisition. I think they announce it in 2017. So tell us about how you came in and where you're at today with >>Certainly. So work wave the company. I lied. Join the effects family in 2017. Darren Ruess, who joined I f s in April 2018 recruited me into form a global business unit around service in August of 2018 and the reason why we did this is service isn't only a part of our economies all over the world, but it's a super great growth area that almost every business can go after in in progress both revenue and margins. So we had a lot of great software products, and we really wanted to improve our go to market around this. >>So why, why all of a sudden today, this talk about service management? Why's it becoming so hard? I mean, everybody's always been focused on customer service, but why this service management generally and field service management while the buzz. >>So first off, you've had the evolution of a number of line of business applications and service certainly has been a part of maintenance organizations or break fix where you're going out in repairing thing. What we're realizing now when you talk about service ization, how o E EMS air building what's called aftermarket revenue? There is literally $100 billion of revenue that you can get from that you look, we had Melissa did a nano from Souza. If you think about open source software, they make money from sirve ties, ing, open source software and the products. You look at apple how they're doing APs. So people are starting to realize that service is an engine for brand loyalty, customer experience, not just a cost center. How it used to be, what the >>customers do. Ah, companies do wrong with service one of the areas where they tend to have the greatest inefficiencies where you can help him. >>So first off, I'd say that often in the C suite, unless they're pure place service companies. They don't understand how transformative service is and how important it is to their brand. Many times now, if you have digital enablement of a new customer, the first time they see a face of your brand might be your service technician. So getting the awareness of the C suite is Step one, because we want to start talking about outcomes that grow revenue and profits and getting them to invest in service. So you know, many times will say, Oh, I want to do a C. R M project. I want to do an E r P project. That's certainly things were good at it. Here I a fest, but we can coach them through how you take the market opportunity for your company and service enabled by our technology and transform. Tomorrow I'll be with Accenture, one of our many great partners, and we're talking about adapting the business, the service transformation, sometimes digitally, sometimes with workflow transformation. But that opportunity and service is huge and almost never. There's no company I know of that's taking 100% of their service market share. That's the difference, especially in slower growth. Asset manufacturing are more mature verticals. >>So I was here last night walking the floor, and I went to the extent you Booth, you know, anytime you see, except you're in a show like this. Okay, Censure. You think Large company Global. I was actually quite impressed a little bit surprised to see you know, their presence here because they they go where the money is, right? And so my specific question is, think, except you think big companies. But you guys obviously focused on what range of companies smaller midsize company. So what's the landscape? Looked like? What's the difference is between sort of smaller and larger companies, >>so that's a great question. I'll take it in part So if you think about a neck censure definitely they looked a large. I also have had meetings with the Lloyd McKinsey Cap gem and I dxc etcetera Also tcs Tech Mahindra which a little bit or more telco focused. So if you think about at the very large and you have telco utilities, large manufacturing O e ems that our customers and definitely the customers I'm pursuing Maur with this focus But we also with work with go down to the S and B We had panels also of, for example, female owners of franchises and also males as well that are creating new service businesses and they're starting maybe with one truck in out providing service. So the fact that we can handle not only the breath and depth of complex service needs, but through work wave we also can encourage the small service businesses to reach their full potential is fantastic. And you know that makes me excited every day. And part of why I focused on service specifically is you are delighting customers. You are the face of a brand and you're making a difference. It's not something that s 02 is esoteric. This is about really value that we're delivering, >>always interested in the dynamics of serving the SNB market >>because one of >>these small companies don't really have that. Maybe family owned there found her own. They don't really put a lot of value on technology. How >>do you >>get in the door? How do you convince them that automating the service function is actually worth the investment? >>Well, first off, I'd say that even the big companies are struggling to go paperless. Okay, so, you know, I think some of the challenges we see survive, if you will, big to small, especially when you look globally in different countries. What have you. But the approach we take in the S and B is that we want to be a software as a service provider, and we were to really handle everything they need in their business. So everything from how they grow leads how they have c r m type functionality. How, then they're delivering service, how they're cross selling service, how they're billing service. So at the at the S M B level, we're putting that kind of all in one technology and there's really not that much integration or I T Service is around that right. We want it to be easy and fast, etcetera, as you go more into the mid market and then definitely into the enterprise. Then you start getting more complexity. You get more I t service's integrations, more configurable ity, sometimes even some customized software. So there is a definitely a difference in the complexity. But the fundamentals of what a service business needs really isn't that much different to your >>customers that you mentioned customize and you guys were SAS space. That's one of the text that we'd like to sort of explore a little bit. A lot >>of >>times SAS companies want to avoid, you know, custom mods. But at the same time, you guys are trying to offer a choice. So help us square that circle. How do you What's the conversation like with customers in terms of how you advise them, You guys obviously do a lot of deep functionality, you know? How do you sort of advise them whether or not to go heavily custom or try to go out of the box? >>Certainly. So in the true, I'd say the small business of a medium you start getting some crossover, but in the small business, Absolutely avoid customization because you won't be able to stay evergreen. It's going to be too hard to maintain. You don't have the subject matter experts, et cetera, so that's really a truce. Ask that from a community. A product engagement. We need to be driving the partnership with the customers that they can use a software out of the box in ways that matter to them. As you start getting into the mid market and especially the enterprise, then it becomes more of a choice, right? How much money do you have to spend? How robust is your organization and set trek? And in general, I advise customers if they care about evergreen software, et cetera. If they care about ease of upgrades, don't customize that Being said, we recognize sometimes in the field with your brand experience Custom mobile. You may need to customize a little bit, so it's Ah, say, a chicken and an egg. You have to weigh the benefits of the costs, and that's what we work through with our >>customers. Specifically morning. What's the upgrade cycle like? There's a customer having the choice Thio upgrade at a particular time, Or do they have a window? >>So it varies primarily, there's a few exceptions, but in general, with the work way, Family of products is true SAS. So it's almost like you're Apple Phone. We pushed the upgrade and you have to take it. Okay, And that's the true SAS model at I. F. S. And this is something Darren talked about in his keynote. We pride ourselves on offering choice. So even though we do have regular release cycles, we encourage customers to upgrade regularly. They have the choice on when they take upgrades and also how they deploy. We have some markets with things like data, privacy and what have you that they may, for that reason or for other reasons, go on premise even still today. So we give them the choice on how they upgrade as well as where they host. >>I'm fascinated by your product line. You have products for pest control. H V. A. C. Plumbing cleaning service is long and landscape. How different are these industries really in terms of their their automation needs? >>Well, I'll tell you one of the personal factors that Darren wanted to make sure I was comfortable with was multitasking. And that definitely is the case, because an I f s, we serve five key industries. So if you think about manufacturing utilities, telco service providers and Andy Okay, that's more at the enterprise level. If you think then when you go toe work wave. Those verticals that you mentioned are all the ones we service at work wave, and they are different. So you know what? Work wave. It's primarily service industries where you're going into ah, home and a little bit The commercial aspect and I effects were also doing more some heavy industries, some very large asset base, things like that. So I like to think about it as a product I service consumer based service. And then you can also differentiate across verticals with what are called high value assets versus, you know, Mork consumer size assets. >>So what >>are >>the one of the key technology enablers that are driving service management today? I mean, obviously, cloud, we talked about sas a lot of push on you X and customer experience, but what other key ones? >>So all the three that you mentioned mobile is huge. You know, Pete and even today, like I run. I work mainly from my phone, and that's really what people want. They want efficient work flows that are configurable on mobile, tied to the customer, the asset, the business. And that's an area that we're continuing to make investment. We also try to prioritize how we bring in the new technology trends into service. Because every technology trend that you see has applicable ity and service supply chain and how you run spare parts specially globally, you can see applications for Blockchain augmented emerged Reality how you can connect the field tech with an expert resource or remote resource to the consumer. That is obvious, right? So you talked about the enabling technologies like Cloud, how we're thinking about data platforms and Data's the currency. Of all of that, we need to d'oh. His service is really about a an execution engine, right? Because to deliver a customer experience that makes people come back to your brand. To purchase Maur, you need great service, so any time somebody talks about customer experience, but they don't talk about service. I want to say you're really naive because you can just get the customer. You have to delight the customer. >>Uh, the, uh, there's a lot of interesting technology going on now in the area. Fleet Management making fleets more efficient How does that figure into the service is? You offer. >>So Fleet management is an important part, and it's one that you have a very tangible return on investment when you deploy route management route optimization, fleet management. So you have the aspects that are very tangible, relate to how do you get the person or the truck where it needs to be when it needs to be okay, and that's pretty well understood. Then how do you get the most efficient schedule that minimizes miles driven gas, used et cetera? And then, of course, you also are thinking about health and safety. There's some cool things now that you can partner that if you have these fleet technologies installed in a way that is integrated in your service business, you can actually get lower insurance premiums, right? So it's not just the conventional use. Cases were starting to think in this kind of gig economy, how you can also be thinking about bringing in Maura what's called a contingent workforce. So if you have surge capacity in a certain period or you want to just do more third party service, probably your appliances. You know they're not the employees, if you will, of a g e or a world polar and LG right there Probably a contingent workforce. And that's a model that's also evolving. But to do Fleet Management across say, contractors, not just employees is an area that were thinking more and more led by some of the uber ization, if you will, of the of the marketplace >>right up against the clock, Marty. But to last questions You made an acquisition today, Vashti Uh, yeah, uh, I thought of it as a tuck in acquisitions, although Darren essentially sort of said, it's gonna make you the leader now in service management. Um And then I want to understand how you guys differentiate from some of the big whales. >>So, you know, overall, we're on track to be about 700 revenue this year in service management. We're working to get to 200 million, right? So this year will probably be around maybe 1/5 50 ish per se. Don't quote me on that check with our coms team, but the point being is that we have the ability to use these tuck in acquisitions and service to accelerate our lead, not just from a revenue perspective, which is what we were just talking about. But from a product perspective, you might have followed Salesforce acquiring Click. That means we are the only independent. Aye, aye. Optimization engine that is field tested. Battle ready. So that's great. This s t a is how we consolidate our dominance and complex service. So what darren was speaking to is not on Lee the service management segment of our revenue and how we continue to accelerate over the oracles in the S a. P s and the service maxes et cetera of the world. But how we take what we're already dominant in and really put the hammer down. Honesty is part of that. >>Your differentiation then if I infers, is focus. Um, you're you're deep customer customs agent deep >>domain expertise. Yeah, So really, when you think about a i optimization, which drives a ton of business value and the ability to handle the complex service cases that then drive business outcomes and outcomes based service models, we are number one and s dea tucks into that, even though it is very strategic on how we position ourselves with leadership and service. >>All right, Challenger becomes number one, Marty. Thanks very much. All right, Keep it right, everybody. Dave A lot with Paul Galen. You're watching the Cube from Boston Mass. I f s world 2019 right back.

(upbeat music) >> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this cube conversation. This is part of our CIO series and Jason Thomas is here, he's the CIO of Cole, Scott, and Kissane. CSK is Florida's largest civil defense law firm. Cube along Jason Thomas, great to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> So, let's talk a little bit about, the firm. largest firm in Florida, the focus is on Civil Defense, so you got lawyers, you got paralegals running around, you got demanding clients. What's the business like that's driving your technology strategy? >> so when I I'm new to legal, so this, I've been here about almost four years now, so I started January. a whole different world. I came from, from Startup Biotech, that line of business and a completely different animal. it's some of what you imagine, very always on the go, very busy, lot of business, we open dozens of cases a day, new cases, so a lot of things going on. >> Really event driven? >> Yeah very, very busy, so and you know technology's, you know the firm has taken stance that, technology is very important, to the firm and, we want to use the best technology possible, to make us as efficient as possible, so that's the chief driver, for tech at the law firm. >> So tech, you know, 15 years ago, whatever it was like, take an email to SaaS, right? So, but I would imagine you're focusing a lot on just attorney and employee productivity, maybe collaboration, document management, compliance. Are those some of the hot topics? And how are you applying technology to deal with those? >> Yep, so that is a big drive, efficiency, using technology to be efficient, and to make our folks productive. What we don't want to see, and that you see sometimes, you throw a whole bunch of technology at folks thinking that it's going to make them efficient and productive, and actually, it could be the greatest technology in the world for one place, and apply it, and you put it in another firm, and it makes us unproductive, so that's kind of the magic there. Kind of a trick to figuring out, what is it that actually is going to make us productive? >> Are there pretty clear swim lanes in your firm? Or is there a lot of shadow IT going on? Because I would imagine a lot of the frustration of, you know, IT folks is, you get the shadow IT, they bring in a point product, and that IT goes, "CIO's calling clean up this crime scene," and is that a problem in your firm specifically? Or even your industry? Or is it pretty much hey, let the tech folks figure out what the right tool for the job is? >> so in my mind the trick here is, it's not going to be any one person, or any practice group that's going to define what's the best option, what's the best tech. I mean thankfully for me, I do try and drive most of the tech out the firm, but the key is, you have to understand how the business runs. Just because it's cool tech, or it's working at one firm, doesn't mean it's going to apply or work in others. So, I spent a lot of time, in conversations with, a lot of the partners and associates. I try to make myself available as much, just to chat, see what they're doing. see what could make them more efficient. Sometimes if you don't ask, they don't even tell you, but if you ask the question, you can learn a lot in 20 minutes from somebody. And that kind of helps me decide, okay, what is going to make sense, or what's the next thing I should be looking at, to help folks out. >> So basically, Columbo questions, for those of you who remember Columbo, kind of ask your basic questions? What about work flow, how do you spend your time? What kinds of questions would you ask attorneys? >> honestly they could be calling about something completely unrelated to what, you know, what I'm thinking. It just could be as simple as, "Hey I'm this thing with this program where I'm trying to do X and this is the way we're doing now. Is there a better way to do it?" Or, it could be as simple as, we just kind of fall into the conversation based on other things. You know. They just want to talk to somebody sometimes. But they're not necessarily going to bring it up, or just don't have the time, they don't have the time. >> So a lot of times in theCUBE we get caught up, We love the tech, we talk about data science, and machine learning, and block chains and everything else, but then there's this basic blocking and tackling, that the CIO has to worry about. I wondered if you could share your perspectives based on your experience, just in terms of, some of the advice you might give to, organizations that are maybe growing, maybe haven't had the experience of a CIO that's been around the block, maybe in different industries? But some of the basic blocking and tackling that you see, that maybe doesn't happen in organizations, that really needs to happen. >> the expectation, or when you're thinking about, thinking about what the next thing is for the firm, or for your company, you also want to kind of think, you want to think long term as well. You want to think three to five years out. So, if we do this now and based on our current, growth projections, will this work for us in three years? Will this work for us in five years? Or what's our game plan? Maybe we start small, and, expand from there, but you don't want to just plan for the immediate you want to plan for the future. That's kind of, I think that's what CIO should be doing. It's not just about the tech, or is it going to work in our environment, but is it going to work for us down the road. Because we don't want, nobody, CFOs don't want to hear, and CEOs don't want to hear that, hey, yeah we just bought this thing last year, but, yeah we're going to have to buy something new now because it doesn't work anymore. >> But it does happen sometimes? >> It happens all the time, you know. >> Right, I remember, it goes a ways back now, but the federal rules of civil procedure, I think it was 2006, and everybody was rushing to plug holes because the courts ruled that electronic material was evidentiary, for whatever, seven years or something. So everybody was like okay, we need to have a system that allows us to comply. So, they went out and bought email archiving systems, which they knew they were going to have to throw away in three or four year. So how do you deal with it? Do you face that? Especially in a compliance oriented world, and you just try to sort of balance the cost and the throw away nature of that initiative with something more strategic? How do you deal with that? And how do you communicate that to the powers that be? >> Number one, no one likes to be held at gunpoint, number one, and especially my boss, so. I mean he gets it right, I mean there's regulations. But I will say, nothing happens as fast as everyone says it's going to happen. so there's always that idea. There's always this panic, oh we've got to put this in, and honestly I feel like tech folks use an excuse, and of course I do too. Say like, oh you all this is awesome. You know, we get to put something new in and, you know no one's going to say no and, it's not always the best approach, and again you kind of have to look at it long term, holistically for the business. You know, what is really going to happen in a few years? Is this technology going to even be a thing in a few years? Or is it just like, just to satisfy an immediate solution? Because again, I don't want, the last thing I hate doing is putting something in and telling my boss that it has to be replaced. He hates hearing that, and I don't want to tell him that either, quite frankly it's embarrassing. >> I don't blame your boss. >> Yeah it's embarrassing, it's just, let's do it right the first time. >> How do you do planning? I mean obviously there's a technology component, of planning, but I'm inferring from what you say that the end of technology is kind of the, the last thing you should be worrying about. You should be worried about the direction of the firm, the business, the growth plan, how do you do, as CIO, planning and how do you align that with the business? >> conversations, so lots of conversations. Lots of conversations with the attorneys. continued conversations with my boss, the CEO, and sometimes I'm not really great about it sometimes. And, you know, weeks will go by, you know, and I won't even have a conversation with him, about what's going on, and he wants to know what's going on. He doesn't understand all of it, but in those, you know, 15, 20 minute conversations, you'll be surprised what you'll learn. What's going on in the business that you didn't, or I didn't know about, and from there I can make decisions about, you know, six months from now, or next year, or during budgeting season, what it is that we need because, budgeting season is not really the time that you need to try and figure out what you want to do for next year. You want to have a plan months before that. You know, You already want to have kind of an idea of what you want to do, I mean, I've been talking to my CFO since, the beginning of summer about things we want to do for 2020. you know, six months, nine months, ahead of time, so. >> So, do you do basically annual planning? Do you try to look out further? Do you formally document that stuff? >> Every quarter, so we have, we kind of have most of the conversations with our, with my CFO and COO. every quarter we have kind of a list of projects/ what is it we want to do for the next couple quarters. We just kind of, track that and based on what we're seeing and how we do, then we, basically we plan each quarter, is how it comes down to. And we have a, we'll call it a white board, a virtual white board of what we're doing and what we want to do. >> But relatively near the midterm planning, you know doing like five year plannings though right? >> No. >> Waste of time to try to do that, or? At least in your business, maybe in pharmaceuticals? >> At least for us it was really, it's hard for us, to do that because of how quickly we grew over the last, again I've only been here almost four years, but even when I started, in 2015, I think we had somewhere around 300 plus attorneys. Now we're somewhere in the 475 range, I'm not saying no one saw that happening, but I don't think we expected that. I mean business has been great and we're happy, and we're fortunate to have it, but you can only plan so much. but do the best you can with the data you have. >> And for organization structure, you report to the CFO, is that correct? >> CEO. >> CEO? Okay so the, so you're a peer essentially of the CFO, is that right? >> Yeah. >> So you talk to the CFO about budgeting? >> Yeah. >> So you've got the CEO's >> More of the nitty gritty you know the details and numbers. >> What's that conversation like? Is it obviously you've got to justify, show a business case, or is it more sort of hate space? >> So here's the good news. I got lucky again. the CFO is very technology forward and so he understands that it drives a lot of efficiencies within the firm. So he gets it but he's been in the history long enough to get it and knows that we can, again he's efficiency a lot, but there's just a lot of efficiencies, and a lot of inefficiencies seen in a lot of what folks do in law firms that no one takes the time to sit down and say okay why do you do it like this? there's got to be a better way. Well this is the way I just do it, and so, we've been able to kind of adjust a lot of those work flows, or change those work flows to make it more cost effective for the business. Like even things simple as, just manage print service, you know, do we store 100 toners in the back somewhere and then wait for someone to, say that they're out of toners? That's not very efficient. and it's very expensive actually, so you put in a much more efficient process in place for toners. Because we're a paperless firm, but you know, I mean we still have to print, so. >> So, the joke about the paperless office was something like paperless bathroom. So, the other way around, I want to ask you about security. Are you the defacto Chief Information Security Officer, or do you have a CISO, or? >> I do not have a CISO that is me, so that'll be me. >> So, that is you. Alright so let's talk security. So, what is the state of security and as you see it? it's constantly evolving. Security practitioners tell us that they got so many tools, they got, they might have a SEC ops team, you may or may not, it may be something embedded in your team, but they've got to respond, they've got to respond, sometimes it's hard to figure out what they should respond to, prioritization, the data, keeping up with the bad guys, all that stuff. What's your state of security? >> so I think these days, it's not really, it's not really about having the best firewall, or the best, outside protection, so I think a lot of the attacks that are happening now, not that they don't happen form the outside, but a lot of it is a lot of social engineering, and a lot of everything. They're taking advantage of the the ignorance of the users, for lack of a better way to say it, so a lot of it's coming in through email, malicious links, and they're taking advantage of the inside, and bad practices, and bad policies, and/or lack of So, I think based on what we see in the news now, and what you read about, it seems like there's a breech every week somewhere. And when it comes down to it you find out that X company didn't, didn't use a strong hashing. For assaulting, on the hashes for their passwords. Like simple simple, just basic basic stuff. It's not like some massive operation like you see in a movie where you know, they're making this big plan to break in a building and it pans out and they're sneaking in you know, from the ceiling and all that kind of stuff. They're just basic stuff, they're just passwords. How can passwords, reused passwords, just databases of passwords everywhere, out in the dark where you can just buy, and they're just utilizing simple stuff like that. It's not even complicated anymore, it's just, it's a lot of social engineering. >> Often times I say that bad user behavior trumps good security every time, I wanted to ask you about the state of the self security in the industry. So you are reinforced, we were there, and Steven Schmidt stood up and he said, "Look at this narrative from the vendor community that says security is broken, isn't productive. It hurts the industry at the same time." I was at VM world recently a couple months ago, last month actually, Pat Kelsinger basically stood up and said security is broken and we're here to fix it, they bought, you know made a big acquisition of carbon black a local company, so you have these two different, you know, polarizing opinions, I don't necessarily feel like the state of security is great. I look back every year I say do I feel more secure or not, you know remember art cove yellow, every year RSA would write his letter. but what are your thoughts on that? Are you basically saying hey, it's, a lot of times it's user behavior, it's things that maybe, you know it's education, is security a do over? I guess is my question. >> A do over in the sense that I think it just comes out to basic education. I have, you'd be, we're in tech and we understand security and we have all these grand ideas and technologies and vendors and software that we use to do different things on all these fancy dashboards. But, if you ask the basic person off the street about, I think I saw a skit on Twitter the other day and you know there was this guy going around asking them, asking people, you know, what's your Facebook password, or you know how complex is it and they'll just give them their passwords and stuff you know, and I mean there's just a lack of basic education, so all us security buffs walk around, and they don't understand what we're talking about, but they don't need to understand what we're talking about. We just need to be able to look, to just have a basic security awareness and training with folks. I have a friend who works in industry, or in a nonprofit that does, that helps folks who've been you know kind of, harassed or abused online. And she's saying, she's telling me, she's like, "Look you guys are great you're really smart, but these folks, they don't know the basic stuff like hey you know someone keeps logging into my internet, and I keep seeing someone, you know, these weird things in my yard, like cameras in my yard and, can I do this with my phone, and oh well I can't use, like, my dogs name for my Facebook password? Like this is just basic stuff that nobody knows. It's not because they're stupid it's just, they just don't know." And so, like we're up here, and your average everyday person is just on this level. >> How about ransom ware? Obviously a hot topic in the business. what should people be, what should they know and what should they be doing? >> at a basic level security ware is training, it's very simple to do, there's a lot of, no that I'm, pushing products there's plenty of products out there. Secure great ones that kind of help your user, or teach them what not to do, or what to look for. we run a fishing campaign in our firm every once in a while and at this point no one clicks on anything without asking. I mean I get direct emails and I say hey, how's this look? Does it look like I should click it or, you know, does it look legit, I mean it's great. They ask now, they know not to do it. Whereas, I mean that's how they get you. That's how they get most of these places. Especially from we get a lot of, we constantly hear about small firms or smaller clients/companies getting hacked, we constantly get emails from them all the time. They'll get hacked and then we'll get the the emails with the links or whatever. that's one on the user side. On the IT side, we just really need to take it back to the basics, let's make sure we have, backups, and a backup policy, and a data protection policy, and an instant response plan. Let's have a plan here, let's not react when something happens, let's just have a plan. Honestly at our firm, we do have backups, we have layered strategy, but there's just some basic things that we don't do, like you know, IT folks, we don't, we don't keep things on our desktop. Let's start with us, you know we're supposed to be the leadership, in this regard, so let's not keep stuff on our desk let's keep stuff on the network. Let's keep it protected. Make sure it's part of the backup schedule. things like that, I think you just start there, because I was you know, I was just reading about, there's an article that came out yesterday, I think it was Washington Post, and it was talking about the ransomer incident in Baltimore a few months ago. They're just now finding out that the, even the IT folks had stuff on their local computers that couldn't be recovered, important documentation. So, this is just data protection 101. You know, we've got to take it back to the basics, take it back. >> Last question, is just kind of your career, so you mentioned before, you were in, I think you said health care, or? >> Yeah so I worked with MSP, so I worked with a lot of start ups. >> So, how'd you get here how'd you become a CIO? People out there may be, you know people in tech, they aspire perhaps to stay in tech, but they want maybe more of a management role. What was your path, and what kind of advice would you give them? >> what I would say is, so it worked out where, I was I was a lead at the company I was at here in Mass at the time, and so long story short my wife had an opportunity in Orlando, we moved, and I said I would never work for a law firm, ever. because I was, when my current boss found out I was coming we have a, a long relationship. When I was in, grew up in Florida and so part of that yeah, okay so I was in the right place at the right time and I knew somebody, that's why it's important to stay on top of networking. Always be networking, not for any other reason, just get to know people, you know. the tough thing that I had growing in the industry, I didn't get involved early on, which I should've. I should've gone to events, things like that. Get to know folks because if the people don't know you, why are they going to hire you? It's easier to get in somewhere, or get an opportunity, if they at least know you, or know your name, or know somebody that knows you. That's number one, so I'm big on that. as soon as I moved back here I've already started, I have quarterly lunches with some of the CIOs at different firms, I just put myself put there. Just hey I'm here, want to get together for lunch? It's that simple. number two make sure this is what you want to do, it's a lot of it, and you hear this all the time, a lot of it has to do with personalities and people. You're managing personalities and people half the time. You are not just doing the tech. If you think you're just going to be doing tech, or you're just going to be doing cool stuff, not the case. So, make sure you can, you know, make sure you know what you're getting into because it's, it's very challenging. >> Now that's great, great advice, so network, it's not, I like to say it's not who you know it's who knows you, so get out there. And then, Love it because, a lot of times I would imagine it's thankless. Right, you hear, >> Yep. >> You hear a lot of the chatter when something goes wrong, >> It's like a defense of a football team, you know, it's fine until, >> Until somebody scores. >> And someone gets sacked you know what I mean, otherwise no one cares. >> Alright Jason well thanks for the update, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE again. >> Thank you. >> Alright you're welcome, alright keep it right there buddy. We will be back with our next segment, right after this short break. (mood music)

>> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jefe Rick here with the Cube were at Oracle Park, and they're moving a bunch of dirt downstairs, but we're happy to be her. Anyway. We're here to really cool thing called Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day. And we're excited to have our next guest. He's heavier. Altamirano, the director of innovation for sport Radar of your Nice to see you. >> Hi. Nice to see you, Jeff. Thank you for having me. >> So for people aren't familiar with sport radar. What you guys all about? >> Yes, the world all about sports date on day and fan engagement. So whenever you want to place a a safe ah, bad Latina market, that's biddings. Regulated are mostly in Europe, for example. Ah, you would use ultimately our data also, whenever you're looking for first time Ah, stat line coming out or you're one to power your fantasy game. That data ultimately comes from us. So >> we talked about before we turn the cameras on. There's lots of sources of data, but your guy's unique value proposition, speed and accuracy is all right. >> Absolutely, Absolutely. You want to think >> of sports data like the same us? Your ticker from the stock market, right? You want to have it fast and reliable as possible. We've been doing that for almost two decades. We have experience, keys and experience in many different ways of collecting. Collecting data from around the world were 2000 people strong 30 offices around the world, dedicated just to collect and into into work with data and evolve and change the narrative of how people talk about sports. >> Okay. Were you guys base? Where's headquarters, >> eh? So we're ahead course in St Gallen, Switzerland, and in the US we have offices in San Francisco in a Minneapolis, uh, New York and endless magazines. All >> right, cool. So we're here in sports Tech? Tokyo will Demo day. What do you doing here? What does this event all about for you? >> Absolutely. This is >> Ah, great events. The grain. And they were shot out to Michael Pearlman and scram Ventures, and they're putting together this ecosystem, right? They want to bring all the best technology, the best sports technology that's out there in the world. Uh, you know, with Japan having all these events leading up to the Olympics next year, bowl so all the way through 2026 what they do, Jeff. They come up and they bring all of those large, great companies that they have conglomerates. And they make you make all of this, um, big opportunity for everyone who's due in something with sports technology in some way, shape or form. And then there's a lot of collaboration. There's investment. There's a lot of things happening there. We we definitely would certainly fit in, especially with our accelerator program. >> Okay. And then, are you guys already in the market in Japan, or is this just kind of a new boost? Into what? What you've already got? >> Things definitely knew boost >> for us. Uh, Asia? Absolutely. Ah, A future focus of also pressing and future focus of us. There's great things happening there, for sure. >> Okay, Now you're director of innovation. So you're actually looking for Toby to be opportunities to take your technology in some different directions, tell us a little bit more about what you're working on? >> Absolutely. Um, I leave the accelerate our program where we provide our data to Some early stage companies were doing something innovative with sports data, so that allows us to a keep tabs on, keep a pulse on innovation that's happening outside of our walls s Oh, that's our external innovation initiatives. But that allows early stage companies to get data and to use their funds into product or marketing or what have you so that they can really develop it and really, you know, uh, deliver something that which we think they can >> write. And you said, you have a couple of partner companies that are here today, correct? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, we have two companies who made it to the finalists were absolutely, very, very proud of those that Edison and also a really So So the guy's a shock. It ah, Edison and Colin and steam, Really, they're great people, and I'm really in a really happy and on really proud to to see them here. >> Good. So what are they doing with your data that's unique in it? Different? >> Absolutely. So what? Edison? What is Zoom with our data's? Our data allows him to better tag and better identify each player that's showing on on the screen. Edison's technology allows for a personalization that its unique you and I could be watching the same game. Let's say we're watching European soccer and your run all the fun, and I'm a messy fun. So you would see targeted messaging and targeted information on Mass. And I will see targeted information on Ronaldo even though we're both watching the same game. That's what, uh, their technology allows an hour. Data propels >> them coming through the lower thirds and the graphics. And how is that house that >> excited zone over late? So it's overlays. >> Html overlays that they can. They provide. So especially for O. T t providers. >> Okay, because obviously I need to have the apse. They know it's me watching and not you for for >> what, exactly that allows for personalization. It's all about personalization, and that's that's definitely something We're very interested in a sport. Reiter. We believe that's the future personalization of the experience watching and engaging with sports. >> It's interesting, though, gives so much of the sports is the communal effect, right? I mean, so much of so much of the greatness of sports is that, you know, two people from different sides of the city can come together and stand shoulder to shoulder and root for their team. So I don't know. Is there some some downside to >> the civilization >> because they kind of or does. It doesn't support the community, because now I hang out with a bunch of other messy A fans and you hang out with their own, although family curious, kind of where personalization fits with community in kind of engaging >> with think baseball park, you know, putting the move to send that and a nice curveball, But definitely you, maybe you you have a >> lot of massive fans who, you know, But they may not be watching the game with you, right? So when you're watching at home, then you're gonna have that experience, and that can allow them for more communication with other people who like the same things that you like, right. But really, personalization is out there in and it's everywhere, right? Like you're everything that you're getting it more and more targeted and we want to avoid you was one of always spam, right? So if anything, a message, that is, if somebody wants to sell your allow those shirt while you're ah, big messy fund, you're probably not gonna like seeing that ad right. So and neither the advertiser will want to advertise you something that you? Definitely not like so that's exactly >> yeah. No, it's interesting. One of my favorite lines about Big Data, right is when it's done well, it's magic. And when it's done poorly, it's creepy. Definitely. Make sure you're gonna tell me the right jersey and other wrong. Absolutely. Alright. Well, Javier. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes. And good luck to your to your two. Ah, entrance into the finals. >> Absolutely. I Thank you so >> much for the opportunity, Jeff. And you're looking forward to seeing the finals >> here. All right. He saw me have Jeff, You're watching. The Cube were in Oracle Park on the shores of McCovey Cove. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at WTG Transform 2019, across the Mass Pike from Fenway Park where we're hoping the rain's going to stop in time for the game tonight where we have 189 users here with Winslow Technology, digging in a lot of technology, networking with their peers, and I'm thrilled to have on another one of the ED users on the program. Plamen Dimitrov is director of Information Technology at Kiawah Island Golf Resorts coming to us from South Carolina. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, as I was actually telling you, I'm familiar with Kiawah, my father is retired down to John's Island right off of Charlestown, South Carolina. You have a beautiful golf course there, there've been professional events there, we actually have one of our Cubeos, does some PGA coverage, John Walls, so he and I have talked about Kiawah a few times, but for those of our audience that aren't as familiar, haven't been able to enjoy it, tell us a little bit about Kiawah. >> Kiawah is a beautiful island, over about 10 miles of oceanfront, side, where the Kiawah Golf Resort is spread out. We have different accommodations with a lot of different activities for all ages, starting with the Sanctuary Hotel, which is a Five Star by Forbes and a Five Diamond by AAA. Or you can choose any of our villas from one to eight bedroom villas. We have five beautiful golf courses, which one of them is ocean course, previously hosted Ryder Cup in 1991, and PGA in 2012, and we are also proud to be a host of the PGA 2021, very exciting. Apart of that, we are announced to be Tennis Resort #1 in the world by tennisresortonline.com. We have over 22 tennis course, different variations from car course to clay. On top of that, we have a lot of pools, swimming pools, water parks, a lot of recreation, kayaking. It can be a beautiful journey for any visitors. >> Yeah, so, Plamen I know some of the IT people listening to this are going to be like, "Boy, he's got a tough job there!" Sounds gorgeous, right on the ocean, so many things there, bring us a little bit inside the IT, your world, what that entails, and, boy, there's got to be some different challenges and opportunities that you face, versus the kind of traditional business IT. >> As every island, we have all of our friends, like salty water and all things like that. And besides that, I've mentioned that the company's spread out over 10 miles, we have a total of 23 locations, and all they share the same systems and applications. Our current challenges, from an IT standpoint, are things that not all of the vendors that can keep up with the current technology and the all new and moderns, so we have some, what we call, old school applications, they can't keep up, and then you have the new applications that can be hosted on the Cloud, for instance. In the same time, those applications need to somewhat work with each other and have some interfaces, so this is where we face the, these days a challenge, a little bit, and where our partnership with Winslow, were able to help us determine which is the best route for us. And we determined that having a data center on island, and they have another one off the island, is the best for us to go. They helped us go through the planning of what's the right set up to be used, and I think we're in the right direction. >> Okay, great, so you have two data centers and you're also using Cloud services, if I heard right? >> Correct. >> Okay. There's been a big discussion here, is like, all right, what is the Cloud's strategy and it is an ever changing world and there is no one right answer, so, when you look at yourselves, what is your Cloud strategy today and what makes you help determine where you'll be moving in the future? >> In one of the sessions, they mentioned it's all about checks and balance, and it's to be able to measure how to apply your cash in a way that it makes sense, and one day, maybe, for some applications makes sense to be on premise, another day makes sense to bring it on the Cloud. And I can give you an example, recently what we did was, we were looking into switching to Office 365, pretty much everybody knows about it, and there's a good study that, after you go over a certain threshold, it's much easier to, and much more cost effective, to have something on premise versus going to a Cloud version. Now, again, it depends on the size of the company, it depends on the... Your future projects and goals, for some people it may be different than us. But I think that the future more and more, things will be what's called colocating the Cloud, which is mainly by other providers, and we're going to have two called a key that you can get to those applications from anywhere. >> Plam, bring us inside a little bit that the data centers, you said you have two of them, what's your infrastructure stack look like today? >> We've been looking at the various solutions, hyper-converged, and hybrids, and with the help of Winslow, we determined that sticking to the 3-2-1 traditional solution is the way we go. We use their Compellent products, all flash erase, very flexible and very reliable, very nice speed it provides, performance-wise they're a great product. Then, after that story solution, you have two data switches and then a number of servers. We use, on top of that, the VMware as our hypervisor, along with their VDI environment called Horizon for some remote clients that they don't need much, but that's basically our setup. >> Great, and how long have you been using the Compellent solutions? >> The Compellent solutions, we've been using them for a year and a half, since I joined the company, but my relationship with Winslow goes far back, since 2013 where I used to work for another company here in Nantucket. And the very first person I worked with was John Cliffords from Winslow. Very great guy, and he introduced us to the Dell world. This is when we bought the first EqualLogic and afterwards, I went to Belmont, where we also bought (mumbles), and we just keep going along. >> All right, great, Plamen, last question I have for you, what brings you to an event like this, what were you hoping to get out of it, and how's it been going for you so far? >> Well, what brings me to an event like this, most of the time is on one side to see what Dell has to offer, and some people attend, they'll conference, but I think a place like this, where you have smaller scale conference, it's much more beneficial for me. A, from a learning experience and B, from creating connections, making connections with other users, which this is the best because sales rep can say, "Yeah, this is what you need." But then, from a user perspective, it's priceless to absorb experience. >> All right, well, Plamen Dimitrov, I really appreciate you sharing your journey, and everything that Kiawah Golf Resorts is doing, thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (funky electro music)

>> It's The Cube, covering WTG TRANSFORM 2019. Brought to you by WINSLOW Technology Group. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. We're here in Boston, Massachusets, across the Mass Pike from Fenway Park, and happy to welcome back to the program Mike Berthiaume, who's Director of Systems Engineering at Nutanix, a good partner of Winslow Technology Group. Mike, thanks for joining us. >> Well as always Stew, it's great to be here. This is number three for us I think, this has become kind a bit of a tradition. >> The third year we've done at this, I've seen you at many of the local user groups here and as I say, a nice home game after lots of travels around the globe. Talking about lots of technologies. >> For sure, looking forward to it. >> What I've always loved, diggin in, in a show like this is we've got users. Scott and the team have a 189 users, many of them are Nutanix customers. So let's start there, what's top of mind from your customers today? >> A lot, so there's a lot happening, as we know in the industry. Things are changing and our customers are trying to figure out what it means for them. But at the end of the day it's all about IT, providing the value back to the business. I think CIOs, and we were just speaking about this in our session, are really pushing their staff to look at public cloud as a potential option. So in many of the folks working on the trenches realize, "Oh yeah, public cloud does make sense "for some things but not necessarily everything." The true strategy we have to have as an organization is multi-cloud, figure out how to make that work. So that's really what we're hearing, and the good news is from our product portfolio Nutanix, and what we're doing. We're really very much in lockstep with that. >> When I think back when that whole wave of hyper-converged infrastructure aged the eye which, Nutanix to its credit never was like, HCI, HCI. It was about simplicity, it was about working on the business, and underneath it that's software that drives the company. The founders of the company came from some of the hyperscalers, some of the file system design underneath there. So when you hear, well the promise of public cloud is supposed to be simple and economic. Well public cloud, we understand is neither simple nor cheap. >> That's right. >> Hyper-converged infrastructure did simplify environments, and changes the economics of how we think if it. When I talk to Nutanix customers it's like, "Oh hey, I don't no longer need to do constant care feeding "of this stack of wires and stuff put together, "much of it is much simpler." You talk about customers, they're going to that multi-cloud, hybrid cloud environment, they're trying to figure out their strategy. Rick Gowan in his presentation said something I thought resonated with me, which is, "You don't want to end up in hybrid cloud, "just you ended up there by mistake without plans," And unfortunately that's where IT is, I've got lots of projects that I do, and I do them as I need them and I realize, "Oh wait, somebody's manage, maintain, "and pull all these things together." So help us understand where Nutanix fits in that multi-cloud story today, which is more than just where people that might not of looked in a couple a years, know the appliance. >> Yeah sure, and I think from are, and mentioned before our roots come from those big large public cloud environments like Google, and Amazon, and others. But when we talk about multi-cloud, and you also made the point that simplicity is probably one of the core values that our customers see Nutanix as being on the forefront there. So I would say that for me, hybrid cloud and I think the mantra within Nutanix, hybrid cloud is not something that many manufacturers have been able to achieve. It's a lot a separate silos, right and as soon as you create multiple silos, you're actually creating operational disruption, and you're actually creating complexity. So if you have to manage public cloud a, public cloud b, your on-prem environment, and maybe your remote offices, and even your edge with different management tools. There's not a ton of value there from a simplicity stand point. So what we strive to do? Is we strive to create that abstraction, that single consistent control plane. That goes between your on-premises, your remote offices, and now truly extend that into the public cloud. So I can manage my resources in the public cloud, in the same way I would on premises. Whether that be next generation applications that probably truly do belong in a public cloud, like cloud-native apps, or my traditional legacy applications that have been running in my data center for years. So that's really what it comes down to, is being able to provide that true seamless experience for users. And at the end a the day businesses and users shouldn't really care where their applications are, it should be whatever most cost effective for the business. And based on who you are as a user, if you're a developer? Or you are a executive? Where my application is shouldn't matter, it should be available wherever I am. >> Mike one of the things that's been interesting watching Nutanix is not the growth of the core market, but its got this three-tier architecture. You have a lot of different software pieces, some of which, at least today are not necessarily directly tied back to the original hyper-converged infrastructure. Where are you with the customers locally? Any kind a proof points? You can give us that kind a help us understand the strategy a bit more. >> I think the majority of the customers are running Nutanix here locally in New England, and probably a good majority of the world are running Nutanix, running kind of the core Nutanix, right. And the value that they're driving from that, they're seeing there is immense. They're getting the simplicity having the ability to run their operations, click one button to do their upgrades without disruption. There is a lot of value there. That's solving many of the issues. Now the higher level capabilities, and the higher level features. In order to be able to deliver those in a consistent way, you have to have a solid core foundation. All right, so that sold core foundation is our core ACI platform, or our cloud like infrastructure. One of the things I'll always say to customers is, "When you look at your Nutanix infrastructure, "your software to find data center, "it actually resembles what's running in a public cloud." So whether, if you're running applications in Amazon for example, you're running in a highly scalable distributed architecture. That's the exact same thing you're doing with Nutanix, and the reason they've been able to deliver those higher value services is because they have that solid foundation underneath it. So if you want to run your environment in a similar way, and true hybrid cloud? You've got to follow their playbook, and the technology that you're choosing, and we believe Nutanix is that right choice. >> Yeah and in many ways we're seeing the blurring the lines between them. I've interviewed people from Nutanix that's on the Cooper Netty Show, that experience that I have and Nutanix has partnerships with some of the public cloud environments. So we're seeing that location matters a little bit less. >> Absolutely, I think the nirvana again if we can imagine, what is this all going to look like five years from now? It's a single portal, single interface where I'm requesting some sort of a business service, or an application. And when I deploy it, it's not going to ask me where it's going to go? It's going to out it where it belongs based on the cost and business logic that I've actually defined in the system. And if it needs to go on Amazon? Or it needs to go on Azure? The decision is going to be made based on business logic, as opposed to technology decision, which I think is what matters. >> So Mike, I can't let you go without talking about, Winslow Technology's here, is a big Dell partner. >> %100. And they sell the Dell XE solution here. They're people out there, there is well the Dell relationship. Yes, they are one Nutanix biggest partners, but they are also, if you look out into the market and you look at market share? The biggest alternative to a Nutanix agency I-Option is the Dell EMC VxRail. So help us understand that dynamic, and how that's playing out in your world? >> Yeah that's a great question, and I kind of expected the controversial questions, as always on theCube, so thanks Stu. In terms a that I would say that when you look at Nutanix, the first thing I'll say is all HCI is not created equal. There is pretty significant differences between the two platforms. Yeah combining and storage, we could loosely define as HCI, but we really can't look at competing solutions as true cloud like infrastructure. Running our controller virtual machine in the user space, and having mobility of applications across hypervisors, and across clouds on a single platform is something very unique to Nutanix. So we're absolutely seeing competitive pressure for sure, but when we have the opportunity to talk to customers about what their multi-cloud journey really means to them? The discussion usually moves forward in a positive way. So I think our view, our perspective. You mention simplicity, we're all about choice, freedom of choice, we don't want to lock our customers into anymore particular technology. Let's do what makes most sense for the business, whether it's alternative public cloud, alternative hardware, or even alternative hypervisors. We give customers choice, we don't have a religion around any one particular technology. We talk about containerization for example, and kubernetes. We give customers the ability to deploy kubernetes on crime, leveraging the source version in kubernetes. All of the capabilities within the Nutanix platform will run on of the hypervisors we support. Right, so that's an important distinction too, it's not like we're telling you have to run one particular hyupervisor to get x feature. So an important distinction point there is we truly do believe in giving our customers the freedom to choose. >> Yeah that's great, just last thing Mike I got to imagine your customers are asking a lot a questions. There's all these new things coming out there that look, sound, or feel a little like what Nutanix is doing. So from the big ones like AWS Outposts, Azure, had Azure stacked, now is the new Azure HCI. So what do you tell your customers when the start calling and asking about these technologies? >> Well, if you look at the history? We've been doing this for a long time now, I've been here for over five years, and Nutanix has been doing this sense two, we've released our product back in 2011, after a couple a years of development. So we've been doing it longer than anybody else, and we also really built our platform around a mantra, that we are highly scalable distributed architecture, along enabling choice, and providing a level of simplicity that customers won't see in any other platform. So just the amount of development and engineering and focus around our customers and the needs of our customers really makes us sustain that. And if you look at just the overall growth of Nutanix, and the transition we're making now to more of a subscription base business model. It makes sense for customers and we've given them the ability to consume in a way that is even more incremental than it was in the past, and certainly more differentiated than what our competitors do. >> All right, Mike Berthiaume always a pleasure to catch up with you on camera, as well as off. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much appreciate it Stu. >> All right, more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCube. (upbeat music)